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Full catalog/TOMSN7AER
TOMSN7AER·v2·dataset

Haze, dust and smoke in the air (Nimbus-7 TOMS)

TOMS/N7 Near UV Aerosol Index and LER 1-Orbit L2 50x50 km
atmosphere NASA GES_DISC Level 2
In plain English

What it measures. Tracks haze, dust, and smoke in the air along with cloud and surface reflectivity, using ultraviolet light to flag airborne particles over land.

How it's made. Derived from near-ultraviolet observations by the TOMS instrument on the Nimbus-7 satellite, processed into per-orbit data at about 50x50 km resolution.

How & where you'd use it. Part of a decades-long record that lets researchers study dust storms, smoke, and pollution far back into the late 1970s and 1980s.

What's measured

ATMOSPHERE › AEROSOLSATMOSPHERE › AEROSOLS › AEROSOL BACKSCATTERATMOSPHERE › AEROSOLS › AEROSOL EXTINCTIONATMOSPHERE › AEROSOLS › AEROSOL RADIANCEATMOSPHERE › AIR QUALITY

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span1978-11-02 → 1993-05-06
  • Measured byNimbus-7 (TOMS)
  • Processing levelLevel 2
  • Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
  • 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

As part of the NASA's Making Earth System Data Records for Use in Research Environments (MEaSUREs) program, this projects describes a multi-decadal Fundamental Climate Data Record (FCDR) of calibrated radiances as well as an Earth System Data Record (ESDR) of aerosol properties over the continents derived from a 40-year record of satellite near-UV observations by three sensors. The TOMS Nimbus 7 version 2 Level-2 orbital data product consists of cloud fraction, cloud optical depth, normalized radiance, reflectivity, residue, and UV aerosol index at approximately 50x50 km resolution (at nadir). This product also contains ancillary variables for ocean corrected surface albedo and terrain pressure. Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) instruments have been successfully flown in orbit aboard the Nimbus-7(Nov. 1978 - May 1993), Meteor-3 (Aug. 1991 - Dec. 1994), Earth Probe (June 1996 - December 2005), and ADEOS (Sep. 1996 - June 1997) satellites. These Level-2 data are stored in the Hierarchical Data Format 5 (HDF5) and are available from the Goddard Earth Sciences (GES) Data and Information Services Center (DISC).

Get the data

tomsn7aer_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="TOMSN7AER",
    version="2",
    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 GES_DISC
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.