Monthly air temperature, humidity and more (AIRS, Aqua)
What it measures. Monthly averages of conditions through the atmosphere — air temperature, water vapor (humidity), surface and skin temperature, cloud amount and height, and more — summarized for one-degree map cells.
How it's made. Built from the AIRS infrared sounder paired with the AMSU microwave instrument on the Aqua satellite, with daily retrievals averaged into monthly values on a one-degree global grid.
How & where you'd use it. Useful for studying climate and weather patterns, tracking humidity and temperature trends, and checking climate models, with each cell also carrying counts and spread so users can gauge reliability.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2002-09-01 → 2016-10-01
- Measured byAqua (AIRS, AMSU-A)
- Processing levelLevel 3
- Spatial extent-180, -90, 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) AIRS constitutes an innovative atmospheric sounding group of infrared and microwave sensors. The AIRS Level 3 Monthly Gridded Retrieval Product contains standard retrieval means, standard deviations and input counts. Each file covers a calendar month. The mean values are simply the arithmetic means of the daily products, weighted by the number of input counts for each day in that grid box. The geophysical parameters have been averaged and binned into 1 x 1 deg grid cells, from -180.0 to +180.0 deg longitude and from -90.0 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 and can be used to generate custom multi-day maps from the daily gridded products. The thermodynamic parameters are: Skin Temperature (land and sea surface), Air Temperature at the surface, Profiles of Air Temperature and Water Vapor, Tropopause Characteristics, Column Precipitable Water, Cloud Amount/Frequency, Cloud Height, Cloud Top Pressure, Cloud Top Temperature, Reflectance, Emissivity, Surface Pressure, Cloud Vertical Distribution. The trace gases parameters are: Total Amounts and Vertical Profiles of Carbon Monoxide, Methane, and Ozone. The actual names of the variables in the data files should be inferred from the Processing File Description document.
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="AIRX3STM",
version="7.0",
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_DISCBrowsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package. Official links
- Access the data via HTTP. GET DATA
- Access the data via the OPeNDAP protocol. USE SERVICE API
- Use the Earthdata Search to find and retrieve data sets across multiple data centers. GET DATA
- AIRS Documentation Page VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- Overview of the AIRS Mission: Instruments, Processing Algorithms, Products, and Documentation VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- AIRS Version 7 Level 3 Product User Guide VIEW RELATED INFORMATION