Earth Data School
About
Full catalog/TEMPO_CLDO4_L2
TEMPO_CLDO4_L2·vV04·dataset

Cloud height and cover over North America (TEMPO)

TEMPO cloud pressure and fraction (O2-O2 dimer) V04 (PROVISIONAL)
atmosphere NASA LARC_CLOUD Level 2 active netCDF-4
In plain English

What it measures. Cloud information over North America, including how much of each area is covered by cloud and the pressure (a proxy for height) at the clouds' centers, at roughly 10-square-kilometer detail. This is a provisional, still-being-validated product.

How it's made. Derived from TEMPO's measurements of how oxygen molecules in the air absorb light, combined with reflectance data and supporting weather and surface information.

How & where you'd use it. Used to screen and correct TEMPO's air-quality measurements and to study cloud cover over North America; because it is provisional, results should be treated with some caution.

What's measured

ATMOSPHERE › CLOUDS › CLOUD PROPERTIES › CLOUD TOP PRESSUREATMOSPHERE › CLOUDS › CLOUD PROPERTIES › CLOUD FRACTION

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2023-08-02 → ongoing
  • Measured byIS-40e (TEMPO)
  • Processing levelLevel 2
  • FormatsnetCDF-4
  • 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

O2-O2 cloud Level 2 (PROVISIONAL) 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-O2slant 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

tempo_cldo4_l2_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="TEMPO_CLDO4_L2",
    version="V04",
    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.