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Full catalog/MIL3QAE
MIL3QAE·v004·dataset

Haze, dust and smoke in the air, seasonal (MISR)

MISR Level 3 Component Global Aerosol Product covering a quarter (seasonal) V004
atmosphere NASA LARC_CLOUD Level 3 active HDF-EOS2
In plain English

What it measures. A season-by-season summary of how much haze, dust, and smoke hang in the air, plus a breakdown of what kinds of particles are most common. It reports a standard measure of how much the air dims light.

How it's made. Produced from the MISR instrument on NASA's Terra satellite, which views each spot from nine angles, by averaging its detailed aerosol readings onto a half-degree global grid for each three-month season.

How & where you'd use it. Useful for tracking air-quality patterns and how dust and smoke shift with the seasons across the globe. Note that data collection for this product ended in 2017.

What's measured

ATMOSPHERE › AEROSOLS › AEROSOL PARTICLE PROPERTIES › AEROSOL CONCENTRATIONATMOSPHERE › AEROSOLS › AEROSOL EXTINCTIONATMOSPHERE › AEROSOLS › AEROSOL OPTICAL DEPTH/THICKNESS › UV AEROSOL INDEXATMOSPHERE › AIR QUALITY › TURBIDITYATMOSPHERE › AIR QUALITY › PARTICULATES

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

MIL3QAE_004 is the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) Level 3 Component Global Aerosol Product covering a quarter (seasonal) version 4. It contains a statistical summary of column aerosol 555-nanometer optical depth and a monthly aerosol compositional type frequency histogram. This data product is a global summary of the Level 2 aerosol parameters of interest averaged over a quarter (seasonal) and reported on a geographic grid with a resolution of 0.5 degrees by 0.5 degrees. The seasons are winter (December from the previous year, January, February), spring (March, April, May), summer (June, July, August), and fall (September, October, November). Data collection for this product was completed in May of 2017. The MISR instrument consists of nine push-broom cameras that measure radiance in four spectral bands. Global coverage is achieved in nine days. The cameras are arranged with one camera pointing toward the nadir, four forward, and four aftward. It takes seven minutes for all nine cameras to view the exact surface location. The view angles relative to the surface reference ellipsoid are 0, 26.1, 45.6, 60.0, and 70.5 degrees. The spectral band shapes are nominally Gaussian, centered at 443, 555, 670, and 865 nm. MISR is designed to view Earth with cameras in 9 different directions. As the instrument flies overhead, each piece of Earth's surface below is successively imaged by all nine cameras in 4 wavelengths (blue, green, red, and near-infrared). The goal of MISR is to improve our understanding of the effects of sunlight on Earth and distinguish different types of clouds, particles, and surfaces. Specifically, MISR monitors the monthly, seasonal, and long-term trends in three areas: 1) amount and type of atmospheric particles (aerosols), including those formed by natural sources and by human activities; 2) amounts, types, and heights of clouds, and 3) distribution of land surface cover, including vegetation canopy structure.

Get the data

mil3qae_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="MIL3QAE",
    version="004",
    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.