Cloud height and how much sky clouds cover (TEMPO)
What it measures. Information about clouds over North America: how much of the sky is covered by cloud and how high the clouds sit, at roughly 10-km detail.
How it's made. Derived from the TEMPO instrument's measurements (cloud cover from reflected light at 466 nm, cloud height from oxygen-pair absorption), processed into Level 2 cloud files using lookup tables and weather data.
How & where you'd use it. Provisional product used to account for clouds when measuring air quality and trace gases over North America, and to study cloud cover and height.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2023-08-02 → 2025-09-16
- Measured byIS-40e (TEMPO)
- Processing levelLevel 2
- FormatsnetCDF-4
- StatusCOMPLETE
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
O2-O2 cloud Level 2 files provide cloud information at TEMPO’s native spatial resolution, ~10 km^2 at the center of the Field of Regard (FOR), for individual granules. Each granule covers the entire North-South TEMPO FOR but only a portion of the East-West FOR. The files are provided in netCDF4 format, and contain information on effective cloud fraction (ECF), cloud optical centroid pressure (OCP), ancillary data, processing quality flags, etc. The ECF is derived from reflectance at 466 nm. The OCP is derived from O2-O2 slant column density. The cloud retrieval uses Look Up Tables (LUTs) of reflectance and air mass factors, GEOS-CF meteorology, and GLER surface albedo. These data reached provisional validation on December 9, 2024.
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="TEMPO_CLDO4_L2",
version="V03",
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 LARC_CLOUD Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package. Official links
- How to cite ASDC data VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- Earthdata Search for TEMPO_CLDO4_L2_V03 (NASA Application to search, discover, visualize, refine, and access NASA Earth Observation data) GET DATA
- ASDC Data and Information for TEMPO VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring Pollution (TEMPO) Project Trace Gas and Cloud Level 2 and 3 Data Products: User Guide VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- Level 2 Science Data Product Validation Plan VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- ATBD_TEMPO_v3_O2_Cloud_Product VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- TROPOSPHERIC EMISSIONS: MONITORING OF POLLUTION (TEMPO) PROJECT Validation and Quality Assessment of the TEMPO Level-2 Trace Gas Products VIEW RELATED INFORMATION