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Full catalog/OMSO2
OMSO2·v004·dataset

Sulfur dioxide air pollution (OMI/Aura)

OMI/Aura Sulphur Dioxide (SO2) Total Column 1-orbit L2 Swath 13x24 km V004 (OMSO2) at GES DISC
atmosphere NASA GES_DISC Level 2 active
In plain English

What it measures. Measures how much sulfur dioxide gas is in the air column overhead, with separate estimates tuned for human-made pollution versus volcanic sources, plus quality flags and location details.

How it's made. Produced from the OMI instrument on NASA's Aura satellite using an improved analysis method, with each file covering the daylit half of an orbit at roughly 13x24 km detail.

How & where you'd use it. Used to monitor sulfur dioxide pollution from power plants and industry, and to track emissions from volcanic eruptions.

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 OMI/Aura Sulphur Dioxide (SO2) Total Column 1-orbit L2 Swath 13x24 km (OMSO2) data product 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="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.