Global haze and dust in the air (Copernicus aerosol)
What it measures. How much haze, dust, smoke, and pollution particles are in the air (aerosol optical depth), mapped globally in 4.5 km blocks over land and sea, skipping snow, ice, and very cloudy areas.
How it's made. Built by combining color (OLCI) and thermal (SLSTR) measurements from ESA Copernicus' Sentinel-3 satellites into a Level-2 Synergy aerosol product.
How & where you'd use it. Helps monitor air quality, dust storms, wildfire smoke, and the effect of airborne particles on climate.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2020-04-16 → ongoing
- Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
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 Collection provides the Sentinel-3 Synergy Level-2 Aerosol Optical Depth product, which is a downstream development of the Sentinel-2 Level-1 OLCI FR and SLSTR Radiances and Brightness Temperatures products. The dataset provides both retrieved and diagnostic global aerosol parameters at super-pixel (4.5 km x 4.5 km) resolution in a single NetCDF file for all regions over land and ocean free of snow/ice cover, excluding high cloud fraction data.
Get the data
# ESA Copernicus Data Space — open STAC API (free account)
from pystac_client import Client
cat = Client.open("https://stac.dataspace.copernicus.eu/v1")
search = cat.search(
collections=["sentinel-3-syn-2-aod-ntc"], # add _cog or _nc for a format variant
bbox=(-10, 35, 30, 60), # your area (W,S,E,N)
datetime="2024-01-01/2024-12-31",
)
items = list(search.items()) # then read assets with rioxarray / xarrayBrowsing the Copernicus STAC is open; downloading bytes needs a free Copernicus Data Space account.
Official links
- Open data source Copernicus STAC