Sulfur dioxide pollution in the air, daily (Aura)
What it measures. Reports sulfur dioxide pollution in the air as a total column amount, collected each day and sorted into a fine global grid, along with extras like haze index and cloud information.
How it's made. Built by binning the OMI instrument's pixel-level sulfur dioxide measurements (from NASA's Aura satellite) into a 0.125-degree daily grid without averaging them together.
How & where you'd use it. Lets scientists track volcanic eruptions and industrial pollution while choosing their own filtering, useful for air-quality and volcanic-hazard work.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2004-10-01 → ongoing
- Measured byAura (OMI)
- Processing levelLevel 2G
- 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
This Level-2G daily global gridded product OMSO2G is based on the pixel level OMI Level-2 SO2 product OMSO2. OMSO2G data product is a special Level-2 gridded product where pixel level products are binned into 0.125x0.125 degree global grids. It contains the data for all scenes that have observation time between UTC times of 00:00:00 and 23:59:59.9999 . All data pixels that fall in a grid box are saved without averaging. Scientists can apply a data filtering scheme of their choice and create new gridded products. The OMSO2G data product contains almost all parameters that are contained in OMSO2 files. For example, in addition to three values of SO2 Vertical column corresponding to three a-priori vertical profiles used in the retrieval algorithm, and ancillary parameters, e.g., UV aerosol index, cloud fraction, cloud pressure, geolocation, solar and satellite viewing angles, and quality flags. The OMSO2G files are stored in the version 5 EOS Hierarchical Data Format (HDF-EOS5). Each file contains daily data from approximately 15 orbits. The maximum file size for the OMTO3G data product is about 146 Mbytes.
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="OMSO2G",
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. Official links
- Access the data via HTTPS. GET DATA
- Use the Earthdata Search to find and retrieve data sets across multiple data centers. GET DATA
- README Document VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- OMI Data User's Guide VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- OMI Algorithm Theoretical Basis Documents VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- File Specification Document VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- PUBLICATIONS VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- Access the data via the OPeNDAP protocol. USE SERVICE API