Gases in the upper air measured at sunrise/sunset (raw)
What it measures. Vertical profiles of gases and particles in the upper atmosphere — including ozone, water vapor, and several nitrogen compounds — captured at the moment of a single sunrise or sunset.
How it's made. Collected by the SAGE III instrument on the International Space Station, which watches sunlight or moonlight passing through the atmosphere's edge to read its composition.
How & where you'd use it. Used to monitor ozone and atmospheric composition over the long term, including assessments of ozone-layer recovery. This is a low-level product that often feeds into higher-level analyses.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2017-06-07 → ongoing
- Measured byISS (SAGE III)
- Processing levelLevel 2
- Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
- FormatsBinary
- 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
g3bsspb_6 is the Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment III (SAGE III) on the International Space Station (ISS) (SAGE III/ISS) Level 2 Solar Event Species Profiles (Native) V06 data product. It contains all the species products for a single solar event. SAGE III was Launched on February 19, 2017 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Kennedy Space Center, SAGE III-ISS is the second instrument from the SAGE III project, externally mounted on the ISS. This ISS-based instrument uses a technique known as occultation, which involves looking at the light from the Sun or Moon as it passes through Earth's atmosphere at the edge, or limb, of the planet to provide long-term monitoring of ozone vertical profiles of the stratosphere and mesosphere. The data provided by SAGE III-ISS includes key components of atmospheric composition and their long-term variability, focusing on the study of aerosols, chlorine dioxide, clouds, nitrogen dioxide, nitrogen trioxide, pressure and temperature, and water vapor. SAGE data has historically been used by the World Meteorological Organization to inform their periodic assessments of ozone depletion. These new observations from the International Space Station will continue the SAGE team's contributions to ongoing scientific understanding of the Earth's atmosphere.
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="g3bsspb",
version="6",
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. Official links
- SAGE III/ISS Version 6.00 DPUG (Data Product User's Guide) VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- SAGE III/ISS Version 6.00 Release Notes VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- How to cite ASDC data VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- Earthdata Search for g3bsspb_6 (NASA Application to search, discover, visualize, refine, and access NASA Earth Observation data) GET DATA
- Virtual Directory for g3bsspb_6 GET DATA
- SAGE III Algorithm Theoretical Basis Document (ATBD) Solar and Lunar Algorithm VIEW RELATED INFORMATION