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Full catalog/AIRS3C2D
AIRS3C2D·v005·dataset

Daily mid-air carbon-dioxide amounts (Aqua)

AIRS/Aqua L3 daily CO2 in the free troposphere (AIRS-only) 2.5 degrees x 2 degrees V005 (AIRS3C2D) at GES DISC
atmosphere NASA GES_DISC Level 3
In plain English

What it measures. The daily average amount of carbon dioxide in the middle layer of the atmosphere, reported across a global grid in standard CO2 concentration units.

How it's made. Derived from the AIRS infrared sounder on the Aqua satellite, then averaged into grid cells (roughly 2.5 by 2 degrees) for each 24-hour period.

How & where you'd use it. Helps researchers track where mid-air CO2 is concentrated and how it changes over time, supporting climate and carbon studies.

What's measured

ATMOSPHERE › ATMOSPHERIC RADIATION › ABSORPTIONATMOSPHERE › ATMOSPHERIC RADIATION › RADIATIVE FORCINGATMOSPHERE › ATMOSPHERIC CHEMISTRY › CARBON AND HYDROCARBON COMPOUNDS › ATMOSPHERIC CARBON DIOXIDE

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2010-01-01 → 2017-02-28
  • Measured byAqua (AIRS)
  • Processing levelLevel 3
  • Spatial extent-180, -60, 180, 90
  • StatusCOMPLETE

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. This product is the AIRS mid-tropospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Level 3 Daily Gridded Retrieval, from the AIRS instrument on board of Aqua satellite. It is daily gridded data, at 2.5x2 deg (lon)x(lat) grid cell size. The data is in mole fraction units (data x 10^6 =ppm in volume). This is a total tropospheric column property. The file format is HDF-EOS 2.12 corresponding to HDF4. This AIRS mid-tropospheric CO2 Level 3 daily Gridded Retrieval Product contains standard retrieval means, standard deviations and input counts as well as the latitude and longitude arrays giving the centers of the grid boxes. Each file covers a 24-hour period. The mean values are simply the arithmetic means of the individual CO2 retrievals which fall within that grid box over the period. The mid-tropospheric CO2 retrievals have been averaged and binned into 2.5 x 2 deg grid cells, from -180.0 to +180.0 deg longitude and from -60.0 to +90.0 deg latitude. For each grid map of 4-byte floating-point mean values there is a corresponding 4-byte floating-point map of standard deviation and a 2-byte integer grid map of counts. The counts map provides the user with the number of points per bin that were included in the mean.

Get the data

airs3c2d_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="AIRS3C2D",
    version="005",
    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.