Air pollution nitrogen dioxide (OMPS, Suomi-NPP)
What it measures. How much nitrogen dioxide, a common air pollutant from traffic and combustion, sits in the column of air overhead, separated into the part near the ground and the part higher up.
How it's made. Retrieved from light measured by the OMPS Nadir-Mapper instrument on the Suomi-NPP satellite, processed one orbit at a time at about 50 km per pixel.
How & where you'd use it. Used to monitor air quality and track pollution from cities, industry, and traffic across the globe.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2012-01-26 → ongoing
- Measured bySuomi-NPP (OMPS)
- 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 OMPS-NPP L2 NM Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) Total and Tropospheric Column swath orbital collection 2 version 2.0 product contains the retrieved nitrogen dioxide (NO2) measured by the Ozone Mapping and Profiling Suite (OMPS) Nadir-Mapper (NM) sensor on the Suomi-NPP satellite. A direct vertical column fitting (DVCF) algorithm is used to retrieve the NO2 total column amount and a new spatial technique is applied to separate the stratospheric and tropospheric amounts. Each granule contains data from the daylight portion for a single orbit or about 50 minutes. Spatial coverage is global (-90 to 90 degrees latitude), and there are about 14 orbits per day each with a swath width of 2600 km. There are 35 pixels in the cross-track direction, with a pixel resolution of about 50 km x 50 km at nadir. The files are written using the Hierarchical Data Format Version 5 or HDF5.
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="OMPS_NPP_NMNO2_L2",
version="2",
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. Official links
- Access the data via HTTPS. GET DATA
- Access the data via the OPeNDAP protocol. USE SERVICE API
- Use the Earthdata Search to find and retrieve data sets across multiple data centers. GET DATA
- README Document VIEW RELATED INFORMATION