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Full catalog/TEMPO_HCHO_L2_NRT
TEMPO_HCHO_L2_NRT·vV02·dataset

Formaldehyde in the air, hourly over North America (TEMPO, near-real-time)

TEMPO formaldehyde total column V02 (NRT) (PROVISIONAL)
atmosphere NASA LARC_CLOUD Level 2 active netCDF-4
In plain English

What it measures. How much formaldehyde, a gas tied to pollution and wildfire smoke, is present in the air column over North America, measured hourly during daylight at about a 10-kilometer scale.

How it's made. Retrieved from the TEMPO instrument (a satellite watching North America) using a fast, near-real-time version of its processing that fits the gas signature in measured light spectra.

How & where you'd use it. Designed for quick-turnaround needs like air-quality monitoring and tracking pollution and smoke as conditions change through the day; this is a provisional, low-latency product.

What's measured

ATMOSPHERE › ATMOSPHERIC CHEMISTRY › CARBON AND HYDROCARBON COMPOUNDS › FORMALDEHYDE

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2025-09-17 → 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

Formaldehyde Level 2 (PROVISIONAL) files provide trace gas 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 vertical columns, ancillary data used in air mass factor calculations and reference sector corrections, and retrieval quality flags. The retrieval uses a three-step approach: (1) spectral fitting of slant columns, (2) air mass factor calculation and derivation of vertical columns, and (3)reference sector corrections. The formaldehyde near real-time (NRT) files are produced using a fast version of the TEMPO baseline retrieval processor. The TEMPO NRT products are useful for applications with low-latency requirements (<2-3 hours after observation is taken). The NRT processing optimizes radiance calibration, image navigation and registration, and cloud and trace gas retrievals for rapid processing, while ensuring that product quality is sufficient for most NRT applications.

Get the data

tempo_hcho_l2_nrt_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="TEMPO_HCHO_L2_NRT",
    version="V02",
    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.