Monthly snapshot of the whole atmosphere (Aqua, 1°)
What it measures. A monthly, whole-atmosphere snapshot averaged into one-degree (roughly 100 km) grid boxes worldwide, including surface and air temperature, temperature and humidity profiles, water vapor, and cloud amounts.
How it's made. Built by averaging daily retrievals from the combined AIRS infrared and AMSU microwave sounders on NASA's Aqua satellite into a monthly global grid, with standard deviations and counts included.
How & where you'd use it. A go-to reference for monthly atmospheric conditions in climate research, weather studies, and tracking long-term changes in temperature and moisture.
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) and the Humidity Sounder for Brazil (HSB), AIRS constitutes an innovative atmospheric sounding group of visible, 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 x1 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="006",
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
- Get map example for NASA GES DISC AIRS Gridded L3 data Web Map Service. USE SERVICE API
- Example of getting coverage data from the NASA GES DISC AIRS Gridded L3 data Web Coverage Service. It requests one of the variables, AIRX3STM:CO_VMR_A as listed in the GetCapabilities response, at given TIME and BBOX. USE SERVICE API
- AIRS Documentation Page VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- README Document VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- AIRS Version 6 Processing Files Description Document. VIEW RELATED INFORMATION