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Full catalog/MIL3DAL
MIL3DAL·v006·dataset

How much sunlight the surface reflects, daily (MISR)

MISR Level 3 Component Global Albedo product covering a day V006
atmosphere NASA LARC_CLOUD Level 3 active HDF-EOS2
In plain English

What it measures. Daily global maps of albedo, which is how much incoming sunlight the surface reflects back rather than absorbs.

How it's made. Produced from the MISR multi-angle camera instrument on NASA's Terra satellite as a daily Level-3 (gridded summary) product.

How & where you'd use it. Surface reflectivity affects how much the Earth heats up, so this supports climate and energy-balance studies. The very brief documentation means details should be checked against MISR's product notes.

What's measured

ATMOSPHERE › AIR QUALITY › PARTICULATESATMOSPHERE › AIR QUALITY › TURBIDITYATMOSPHERE › ATMOSPHERIC RADIATION › ALBEDO

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span1999-12-18 → ongoing
  • Measured byTerra (MISR)
  • Processing levelLevel 3
  • Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
  • FormatsHDF-EOS2
  • 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

MISR Level 3 Component Global Albedo publicly available product covering a day to be used starting with MISR Release V3.2.

Get the data

mil3dal_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="MIL3DAL",
    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 LARC_CLOUD
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.