Monthly ocean conditions from microwave sensors (1/4 deg)
What it measures. Monthly snapshots of ocean conditions: water vapor in the air, cloud liquid water, and wind speed at the sea surface, plus sea surface temperature, all on a quarter-degree map.
How it's made. Built by averaging readings from the AMSR-E and AMSR2 microwave sensors (on the Aqua and GCOM-W1 satellites) into monthly grids, with sea temperatures added from a separate NOAA product.
How & where you'd use it. Handy for studying ocean and weather patterns, tracking seasonal and year-to-year changes, and feeding climate research.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2002-06-01 → 2011-10-04
- Measured byAqua (AMSR-E) · GCOM-W1 (AMSR2)
- Processing levelLevel 3
- Spatial extent-180, -89.24, 180, 89.24
- FormatsHDF-EOS5
- 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 AMSR-E/AMSR2 Unified L3 Global Monthly Ascending/Descending .25x.25 deg Ocean Grids data set is a gridded product that reports monthly estimates of water vapor, cloud liquid water content, and surface wind speed over the ocean. The data are derived from resampled Near Real-Time (NRT) Level-1R data provided by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Sea surface temperatures from the NOAA 1/4° Daily Optimum Interpolation Sea Surface Temperature (OISST) product are also included.
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="AU_MoOcn",
version="1",
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 NSIDC_CPRDBrowsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package. Official links
- Search and order NASA Earth Science data using spatial and temporal filters. Reformatting, reprojecting, and subsetting options are available for some data sets. GET DATA
- Quickly download a few files using a web browser, or access data through a command-line utility such as WGET. GET DATA
- Search data by spatial and/or temporal ranges or file name. Choose from various download options, including a Python script. GET DATA
- A Python library to search and access NASA Earth science data with just a few lines of code GET DATA
- Find more data access options and help resources. VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- AMSR-E/AMSR2 Unified L3 Global Monthly Ascending/Descending .25x.25 deg Ocean Grids, Version 1 User Guide VIEW RELATED INFORMATION