Haze, clouds, and water vapor snapshots (Aqua)
What it measures. A compact bundle of atmosphere measurements taken in 5-minute swaths, including airborne haze (aerosols), cloud properties, and water vapor. It samples the larger data products to stay small while keeping their statistical character.
How it's made. Drawn from the MODIS instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite, packaging together a subset of the atmosphere team's products at 5 km and 10 km scales.
How & where you'd use it. A practical, smaller dataset that lets researchers build their own custom summaries of aerosols, clouds, and water vapor.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2002-07-04 → ongoing
- Measured byAqua (MODIS)
- Processing levelLevel 2
- Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
- FormatsHDF-EOS
- 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
The MODIS/Aqua Aerosol, Cloud and Water Vapor Subset 5-Min L2 Swath 5km and 10km (MYDATML2) product contains a combination of key high interest science parameters. The ATML2 product provides a subset of datasets from the suite of atmosphere team products on both a 10 km scale (aerosols) and 5km scale (native 5 km cloud properties and a 5x5 pixel sample of the 1km cloud datasets). The ATML2 product employs the same 5x5 pixel sampling scheme for the 1km native resolution Level 2 products as is used in the MOD08 Level 3 global aggregated product, an approach that has been shown to retain statistical integrity for multi-day aggregations. The C6 significantly increases the number of datasets included in the ATML2 product, including the full suite of QA datasets. Since the ATML2 data granule file size is significantly smaller than the combined size of the individual L2 products, and because the 1 km pixel sampling is consistent with the L3 algorithm, the ATML2 product is a more practical means for the user community to develop research L3 algorithms for their own specific purposes. For more information, visit the MODIS Atmosphere website at: https://modis-atmos.gsfc.nasa.gov/products/joint-atm
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="MYDATML2",
version="6.1",
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 LAADS Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.