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Full catalog/ML3DBH2O
ML3DBH2O·v005·dataset

Water vapor high in the atmosphere, daily (MLS, Aura)

MLS/Aura Level 3 Daily Binned Water Vapor (H2O) Mixing Ratio on Assorted Grids V005 (ML3DBH2O) at GES DISC
atmosphere NASA GES_DISC Level 3 active
In plain English

What it measures. Daily maps of how much water vapor is present high in the atmosphere, at many altitude levels reaching from the lower atmosphere up into very thin air.

How it's made. Derived from microwave energy measured by the Microwave Limb Sounder on NASA's Aura satellite, then averaged onto daily grids.

How & where you'd use it. Used by atmospheric scientists to study how water vapor, a key greenhouse gas, is distributed and moves high in the atmosphere.

What's measured

ATMOSPHERE › ATMOSPHERIC WATER VAPOR › WATER VAPOR PROFILES › WATER VAPOR MIXING RATIO PROFILES

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2004-08-02 → ongoing
  • Measured byAura (MLS)
  • Processing levelLevel 3
  • Spatial extent-180, -82, 180, 82
  • 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

ML3DBH2O is the EOS Aura Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) daily binned on various vertical grids product for water vapor (H2O) derived from radiances measured primarily by the 190 GHz radiometer. The data version is 5.1. Spatial coverage is near-global (-82 to +82 degrees latitude), with a spatial resolution of 4 degrees latitude by 5 degrees longitude. The recommended useful vertical range is between 316 and 0.00215 hPa, and the vertical resolution is about 1.5 km at 316 hPa increasing to 3.5 km to 4.64 hPa, and degrades to 15 km above 0.1 hPa. Users of the ML3DBH2O data product should read chapter 4 and section 3.9 of the EOS MLS Level 2 Version 5 Quality Document for more information. The data files are archived in the netCDF4 format, which is also compatible with HDF5 readers and tools. Each file contains two grid objects (profile and column data), each with a set of data and geolocation fields, grid attributes, and metadata.

Get the data

ml3dbh2o_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="ML3DBH2O",
    version="005",
    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 GES_DISC
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.