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Full catalog/OMSO2
OMSO2·v003·dataset

Sulfur dioxide air pollution (OMI/Aura)

OMI/Aura Sulphur Dioxide (SO2) Total Column 1-orbit L2 Swath 13x24 km V003 (OMSO2) at GES DISC
atmosphere NASA GES_DISC Level 2 active
In plain English

What it measures. How much sulfur dioxide is in the air column, with different estimates tailored to whether you're looking at human-made pollution or volcanic sources, plus quality flags and location information.

How it's made. Retrieved from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument on NASA's Aura satellite, using an improved analysis method that sharpens detection of human-made sulfur dioxide; this is the standard (non-rush) version.

How & where you'd use it. Used to monitor sulfur dioxide from power plants, smelters, and volcanoes, supporting air-quality studies, emissions tracking, and volcanic-hazard work.

What's measured

ATMOSPHERE › ATMOSPHERIC CHEMISTRY › SULFUR COMPOUNDS › SULFUR DIOXIDE

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 Aura Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) level 2 sulphur dioxide (SO2) total column product (OMSO2) has been updated with a principal component analysis (PCA)-based algorithm (v2) with new SO2 Jacobian lookup tables and a priori profiles that significantly improve retrievals for anthropogenic SO2. The data files (or granules) contain different estimates of the vertical column density (VCD) of SO2 depending on the users investigating anthropogenic or volcanic sources. Files also contain quality flags, geolocation and other ancillary information. The lead scientist for the OMSO2 product is Can Li. The OMSO2 files are stored in the version 5 EOS Hierarchical Data Format (HDF-EOS5). Each file contains data from the daylit half of an orbit (~53 minutes). There are approximately 14 orbits per day. The resolution of the data is 13x24 km2 at nadir, with a swath width of 2600 km and 60 pixels per scan line every 2 seconds.

Get the data

omso2_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="OMSO2",
    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.