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Full catalog/TEMPO_NO2_L2
TEMPO_NO2_L2·vV04·dataset

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

TEMPO NO2 tropospheric and stratospheric columns V04 (PROVISIONAL)
atmosphere NASA LARC_CLOUD Level 2 active netCDF-4
In plain English

What it measures. How much nitrogen dioxide pollution sits in the air over North America, given separately for the lower atmosphere and the high-altitude layer, at roughly 10 km detail. Provided hourly during daylight.

How it's made. Comes from the TEMPO instrument watching North America from a fixed vantage in high orbit, using spectral fitting to detect the gas; this is a provisional per-granule product.

How & where you'd use it. Used to track traffic and industrial air pollution as it changes through the day, supporting air-quality monitoring and public-health research.

What's measured

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

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

Nitrogen dioxide 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 tropospheric and stratospheric nitrogen dioxide vertical columns, ancillary data used in airmass 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="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.