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Full catalog/DSCOVR_EPIC_L1B
DSCOVR_EPIC_L1B·v4·dataset

Calibrated full-Earth sunlit images (DSCOVR EPIC, ver 4)

DSCOVR EPIC Level 1B Version 4
atmosphere NASA LARC_CLOUD Level 1B active HDF5
In plain English

What it measures. Calibrated images of the entire sunlit face of the Earth taken in ten narrow color bands from ultraviolet to near-infrared. This is the cleaned-up imagery stage, with instrument corrections applied.

How it's made. Captured by the EPIC camera on NOAA's DSCOVR spacecraft, which sits about a million miles away at a special point between Earth and the Sun, giving it a full-disk view; the raw images are corrected for things like stray light.

How & where you'd use it. Used to measure ozone, aerosols, cloud properties and height, vegetation, and surface ultraviolet light, and it produces the familiar full-Earth photos taken every hour or two.

What's measured

ATMOSPHERE › ATMOSPHERIC RADIATIONSUN-EARTH INTERACTIONS › SOLAR ACTIVITY › SOLAR IRRADIANCEATMOSPHERE › ATMOSPHERIC RADIATION › SOLAR RADIATION

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2015-06-13 → ongoing
  • Measured byDSCOVR (EPIC)
  • Processing levelLevel 1B
  • FormatsHDF5
  • StatusACTIVE

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

Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) is a 10-channel spectro-radiometer (317 – 780 nm) onboard National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) DSCOVR spacecraft located at the Earth-Sun Lagrange-1 (L-1) point giving EPIC a unique angular perspective that is used in science applications to measure ozone, aerosols, cloud reflectivity, cloud height, vegetation properties, and ultraviolet (UV) radiation estimates at Earth's surface. EPIC provides ten narrow-band spectral images of the entire sunlit face of the Earth using a 2048x2048 pixel Charge Coupled Device (CCD) detector coupled to a 30-cm aperture Cassegrain telescope. EPIC collects radiance data from the Earth and other sources through the Camera/Telescope Assembly. EPIC has a field of view (FOV) of 0.62 degrees, sufficient to image the entire Earth. Because of DSCOVR's tilted (Lissajous) orbit about the L‐1 point, the apparent angular size of the Earth varies from 0.45 to 0.53 degrees within its 6-month orbital period. Depending on the season, a complete set of per-band images is taken every 60 to 100 minutes. Accompanying instrument metadata and a series of calibrations and corrections are applied to convert the images to Level 1A format properly. The significant corrections are for flat‐fielding and stray light. Flat-fielding is based on measurements with a uniform light source to measure the differences in sensitivity for each of the 4 million pixels. The resulting correction map is applied to the estimated counts from the CCD. Stray light was measured in the laboratory using a series of small-diameter light sources entering the telescope and imaged on the CCD. A similar set of measurements has been performed on orbit using the moon. The illumination of pixels outside the primary diameter of the light source was measured to produce a detailed matrix map of the entire stray light function, and the resulting stray light correction was applied to every image. Other corrections are also used based on laboratory measurements. For wavelengths longer than 550 nm, there are back-to-front interference effects in the partially transparent CCD (etaloning) that must also be removed from measured radiance. The Level 1B products contain calibrated and geolocated EPIC images with ancillary metadata. These data products are in HDF5 format.

Get the data

dscovr_epic_l1b_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="DSCOVR_EPIC_L1B",
    version="4",
    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 LARC_CLOUD
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.