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Full catalog/TEMPO_NO2_L2
TEMPO_NO2_L2·vV03·dataset

Nitrogen dioxide air pollution, hourly over North America (TEMPO)

TEMPO NO2 tropospheric and stratospheric columns V03 (PROVISIONAL)
atmosphere NASA LARC_CLOUD Level 2 netCDF-4
In plain English

What it measures. Measures nitrogen dioxide, a common air pollutant from traffic and industry, as the amount in vertical slices of the atmosphere (separating the lower-air and high-altitude portions), at about 10 km detail.

How it's made. Produced by the TEMPO instrument, which watches North America and retrieves the gas in three steps from the light it sees; these are provisional-quality hourly readings.

How & where you'd use it. Useful for tracking air pollution as it changes hour by hour across North America, aiding air-quality monitoring and public-health awareness.

What's measured

ATMOSPHERE › ATMOSPHERIC CHEMISTRY › NITROGEN COMPOUNDS › NITROGEN DIOXIDEATMOSPHERE › AIR QUALITY › NITROGEN OXIDES

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

Nitrogen dioxide Level 2 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 tropospheric, stratospheric and total nitrogen dioxide vertical columns, ancillary data used in air mass factor and stratospheric/tropospheric separation calculations, 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) stratospheric/tropospheric separation. These data reached provisional validation on December 9, 2024.

Get the data

tempo_no2_l2_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="TEMPO_NO2_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.