Earth Data School
About
Full catalog/OMAERO
OMAERO·v004·dataset

Haze, dust and smoke in the air (Aura)

OMI/Aura Absorbing Aerosol Index 1-orbit L2 Swath 13x24 km V004 (OMAERO) at GES DISC
atmosphere NASA GES_DISC Level 2 active
In plain English

What it measures. An index of how much haze, dust, and smoke is in the air, calculated from how the atmosphere absorbs ultraviolet light. Note that this version no longer includes a measure of overall aerosol thickness.

How it's made. Produced from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument on NASA's Aura satellite, processed orbit-by-orbit using a method based on surface reflectivity.

How & where you'd use it. Helps track smoke from wildfires, dust storms, and pollution as they drift across regions.

What's measured

ATMOSPHERE › AEROSOLS › AEROSOL OPTICAL DEPTH/THICKNESS › UV AEROSOL INDEX

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2004-10-01 → ongoing
  • Measured byAura (OMI)
  • Processing levelLevel 2
  • Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
  • 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 Level-2 Aura Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) Aerosol Product (OMAERO) version 4 is now available from NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC) for public access. The shortname for this Level-2 Aerosol Product is OMAERO_V004. The data was re-processed in December 2022 using collection 4 Level 1b data and the OMAERO processor version 4.0.0. Since then, this version is also being produced in the forward stream. This version of the product was publicly released in March 2026. There are three Level-2 Aura OMI aerosol products which produce the aerosol index: OMAERUV, OMAERO, and OMTO3. Both OMAERUV and OMAERO are calculated for the 354/388 nm wavelength pair and OMTO3 is calculated using 340/380 nm to be consistent with the TOMS mission aerosol index data records. The OMAERUV product uses the near-UV algorithm and calculates aerosol index using Mie scattering. The OMAERO product uses Lambertian Equivalent Reflectivity (LER) scene characterization. The OMAERO retrieval algorithm is developed by the KNMI OMI Team Scientists. Drs. Deborah Stein-Zweers, Martin Sneep and Pepijn Veefkind are the key investigators of this product. The OMAERO product contains Aerosol Index, and other ancillary and geolocation information. Note that Aerosol Optical Depth is not available in the version 4 product anymore. For this, users are recommended to use the OMAERUV product. The OMAERO files are stored in NetCDF 4 format. Each file contains data from the day lit portion of an orbit (~53 minutes). There are approximately 14 orbits per day. The maximum file size for the OMAERO data product is about 8 Mbytes.

Get the data

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

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