Raw microwave readings over the poles, daily (AMSR2, 6 km)

In plain English

What it measures. Daily averages of raw microwave brightness, how much microwave energy the sensor detected at 89 GHz, over the north and south polar regions, in both horizontal and vertical polarization.

How it's made. Derived from the AMSR-E and AMSR2 instruments (on Aqua and GCOM-W1), resampled by Japan's space agency and gridded at 6.25 km onto polar maps.

How & where you'd use it. A building-block input: typically used to derive sea-ice and other polar products rather than read directly by most users.

What's measured

SPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › MICROWAVE › BRIGHTNESS TEMPERATURE

Coverage & cadence

Time span2002-06-01 → 2011-10-04
Measured byAqua (AMSR-E) · GCOM-W1 (AMSR2)
Processing levelLevel 3
Spatial extent-180, 30.98, 180, 89.24
FormatsHDF-EOS5
StatusCOMPLETE

What you can do with it

Track deforestation, fire scars and land-cover change
Monitor crop and vegetation health (NDVI/EVI)
Map how built-up vs. green an area is over time

Official description

This data set reports 6.25 km resolution, horizontally and vertically polarized average daily 89.0 GHz brightness temperatures for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR) for EOS (AMSR-E) and AMSR2 instruments. The data are provided on north and south polar stereographic grids. The brightness temperatures are derived from Level 1R data that has been spatially resampled by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to unify AMSR-E and AMSR2 observations.

Get the data

au_si6_access.py

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

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="AU_SI6",
    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_CPRD

Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.

What's measured

Coverage & cadence

What you can do with it

Get the data

Official links