Nitrogen dioxide air pollution, hourly over North America (TEMPO)
What it measures. How much nitrogen dioxide air pollution is overhead, mapped hour by hour during the day across North America. It separates the pollution near the ground from the part high up in the stratosphere.
How it's made. Made by NASA's TEMPO instrument, which watches North America from a fixed vantage point high above; hourly scans are combined onto a regular grid (this is a provisional version).
How & where you'd use it. Lets people watch air pollution rise and fall through the day, useful for air-quality alerts, studying rush-hour and industrial emissions, and public health research.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2023-08-02 → 2025-09-16
- Measured byIS-40e (TEMPO)
- Processing levelLevel 3
- 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 3 files provide trace gas information on a regular grid covering the TEMPO field of regard for nominal TEMPO observations. Level 3 files are derived by combining information from all Level 2 files constituting a TEMPO East-West scan cycle. 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 re-gridding algorithm uses an area-weighted approach. 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_NO2_L3",
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_NO2_L3_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
- ATBD_TEMPO_NO2 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