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Full catalog/AIRICRAD_NRT
AIRICRAD_NRT·v6.7·dataset

Raw calibrated infrared light, fast preview (Aqua)

AIRS/Aqua L1C Near Real Time (NRT) Infrared (IR) resampled and corrected radiances V6.7 (AIRICRAD_NRT) at GES DISC
atmosphere NASA GES_DISC Level 1 active
In plain English

What it measures. Raw, calibrated and location-tagged infrared light measurements from an atmospheric sounder — how much infrared energy the sensor recorded across 2,645 narrow color channels spanning roughly 3.7 to 15.4 micrometers — delivered fast as a quick preview.

How it's made. Produced in near-real-time from the AIRS instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite, refined from its raw Level-1B radiances into a cleaned, resampled Level-1C form covering the globe twice daily.

How & where you'd use it. A foundational input product: scientists use these calibrated infrared spectra to derive temperature, humidity and other atmospheric quantities, so it's typically used via higher-level products rather than directly.

What's measured

ATMOSPHERE › AEROSOLS › DUST/ASH/SMOKEATMOSPHERE › ATMOSPHERIC CHEMISTRY › SULFUR COMPOUNDS › SULFUR DIOXIDESPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › INFRARED WAVELENGTHS › INFRARED RADIANCE

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2002-09-06 → ongoing
  • Measured byAqua (AIRS)
  • Processing levelLevel 1
  • Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
  • StatusACTIVE

What you can do with it

  • Map air pollutants — NO₂, aerosols, ozone
  • Track greenhouse gases and Earth's energy budget
  • Feed weather and air-quality analysis
Official description

The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) is a grating spectrometer (R = 1200) aboard the second Earth Observing System (EOS) polar-orbiting platform, EOS Aqua. In combination with the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) and the Humidity Sounder for Brazil (HSB), AIRS constitutes an innovative atmospheric sounding group of visible, infrared, and microwave sensors. The AIRS Infrared (IR) level 1C data set contains AIRS infrared calibrated and geolocated radiances in W/m2/micron/ster. This data set is generated from AIRS level 1B data. The spectral coverage of L1C data is from 3.74 to 15.4 mm. The nominal spectral resolution lambda / delta lambda = 1200. The spectrum is sampled twice per spectral resolution element in a total of 2645 spectral channels. A day of AIRS data is divided into 240 granules (scenes) each of 6-minute duration. For the AIRS IR measurements, an individual granule contains 135 pixels across-track and 90 along-track pixels; there are total of 135 x 90 = 12,150 pixels per granule. AIRS employs a 49.5 degree crosstrack scanning with a 1.1 degree instantaneous field of view (IFOV) to provide twice daily coverage of essentially the entire globe in a 1:30 PM sun synchronous orbit with the 13.5 x 13.5 km2 spatial resolution at nadir. The L1C swath products are derived from the L1B swath products. The primary purpose of the level 1C is to generate the spectra of radiances without spectral gaps caused by the instrument design and bad spectral points. The AIRS L1C data can be used for comparative (with other IR measurements) studies and for weather-climate research. As a Near Real Time (NRT) product this differs from AIRICRAD.6.7 AIRS differ from routine processing in 2 ways to meet the three hour latency requirements of the Land Atmosphere NRT Capability Earth Observing System (LANCE): (1) The NRT granules are produced without previous or subsequent granules if those granules are not available within 5 minutes, (2) the predictive ephemeris/attitude data are used rather than the definitive ephemeris/attitude.

Get the data

airicrad_nrt_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="AIRICRAD_NRT",
    version="6.7",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from GES_DISC
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.