Earth Data School
About
Full catalog/sentinel-5p-l2-hcho-nrti
sentinel-5p-l2-hcho-nrti·dataset

Formaldehyde in the atmosphere, fast delivery (Copernicus)

Sentinel-5P Level 2 Formaldehyde (NRTI)
atmosphere ESA ESA Copernicus active
In plain English

What it measures. Measures formaldehyde, a gas linked to wildfires, vegetation, and the breakdown of other pollutants, in the air column.

How it's made. Derived from the TROPOMI sensor on ESA Copernicus's Sentinel-5P satellite as a Level-2 product, provided rapidly in near-real time.

How & where you'd use it. Helps reveal pollution from burning and from chemical reactions in the air, an indirect signal of smog-forming activity.

What's measured

SentinelCopernicusESASatelliteGlobalAtmosphereL2HCHONRTIEUEC

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2018-04-30 → 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 Sentinel-5P Level-2 HCHO products, which contains high-resolution imagery of atmospheric formaldehyde concentrations.

Get the data

copernicus_access.py
# 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-5p-l2-hcho-nrti"],   # 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 / xarray
Browsing the Copernicus STAC is open; downloading bytes needs a free Copernicus Data Space account.