Earth Data School
About
Full catalog/OML1BRVG
OML1BRVG·v003·dataset

Raw visible sunlight reflected off Earth (OMI/Aura)

OMI/Aura Level 1B VIS Global Geolocated Earth Shine Radiances 1-orbit L2 Swath 13x24 km V003 (OML1BRVG) at GES DISC
land NASA GES_DISC Level 1B active
In plain English

What it measures. Raw measurements of visible sunlight reflected off the Earth, recorded across wavelengths from about 349 to 504 nanometers, with each measurement tied to a precise location on the ground.

How it's made. Captured by the visible-light detector on the Ozone Monitoring Instrument aboard NASA's Aura satellite, packaged orbit by orbit as a low-level calibrated radiance product.

How & where you'd use it. A building-block input used to create higher-level products about ozone and air quality, rather than something most people would use directly.

What's measured

SPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › VISIBLE WAVELENGTHS › VISIBLE RADIANCE

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2004-10-01 → ongoing
  • Measured byAura (OMI)
  • Processing levelLevel 1B
  • Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
  • StatusACTIVE

What you can do with it

  • Track deforestation, fire scars and land-cover change
  • Monitor crop and vegetation health (NDVI/EVI)
  • Map how built-up vs. green an area is over time
Official description

The Aura Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) Level-1B (L1B) Geo-located Earth View VIS Radiance, Global-Mode (OML1BRVG) Version-3 product contains geo-located Earth view spectral radiances from the VIS detector in the wavelength range of 349 to 504 nm conducted in the global measurement mode. In the standard global measurement mode, OMI observes 60 ground pixels (13 km x 24 km at nadir) across the swath (13 km x 48 km at nadir). Each file contains data from the day lit portion of an orbit (~60 minutes) and is roughly 200 MB in size. There are approximately 14 orbits per day. Once a month, in one orbit, OMI performs dark measurements, it does not perform radiance measurements. In addition, OMI performs spatial zoom measurements one day per month. For that day, this product also contains UV2 measurements that are rebinned from the spatial zoom-in measurements. In original spatial zoom mode the nadir ground pixel size is 13 x 12 km and measurements are available only for the UV2 and VIS wavelengths (306 to 432 nm). The shortname for this OMI Level-1B Product is OML1BRVG. The lead algorithm scientist for this product is Dr. Marcel Dobber from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institude (KNMI). The OML1BRVG files are stored in the HDF4 based EOS Hierarchical Data Format (HDF-EOS). The radiances for the earth measurements (also referred as signal) and its precision are stored as a 16-bit mantissa and an 8-bit exponent. The signal can be computed using the equation: signal = mantissa x 10^exponent. For the precision, the same exponent is used as for the signal.

Get the data

oml1brvg_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="OML1BRVG",
    version="003",
    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.