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Full catalog/TROPICS01ANTTL1A
TROPICS01ANTTL1A·v1.0·dataset

Raw microwave antenna temperatures (TROPICS-01)

TROPICS01 Pathfinder L1A Orbital Geolocated Native-Resolution Antenna Temperatures V1.0
land NASA GES_DISC Level 1A
In plain English

What it measures. Raw antenna temperatures, the most basic microwave brightness readings, recorded at the instrument's native resolution and tagged with their location on Earth.

How it's made. Produced from the microwave sounder on the TROPICS Pathfinder small satellite, which measures channels tuned to temperature, water vapor, precipitation, and cloud ice, organized one orbit per file.

How & where you'd use it. A lowest-level building-block input toward measuring temperature, humidity, and rainfall in tropical storms; it is meant to be processed into higher-level products rather than used directly.

What's measured

SPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › MICROWAVE › ANTENNA TEMPERATURE

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2021-08-07 → 2023-12-17
  • Measured byTROPICS/01 (TMS)
  • Processing levelLevel 1A
  • Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
  • StatusCOMPLETE

What you can do with it

  • Track deforestation, fire scars and land-cover change
  • Monitor crop and vegetation health (NDVI/EVI)
  • Map how built-up vs. green an area is over time
Official description

The "Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats" (TROPICS) mission has a goal of providing nearly all-weather observations of three-dimensional temperature and humidity, as well as cloud ice and precipitation horizontal structure, at high temporal resolution to conduct high-value science investigations of tropical cyclones. The mission comprises a constellation of six identical Space Vehicles (SVs) conforming to the 3U form factor and hosting a passive microwave spectrometer payload. This dataset is produced from the Pathfinder satellite, a single 3U small satellite, which has launched previous to the constellation, on a sun-synchronous orbital plane. Each SV hosts an identical high-performance spectrometer named the TROPICS Millimeter-wave Sounder (TMS) that will provide temperature profiles using seven channels near the 118.75-GHz oxygen absorption line, water vapor profiles using three channels near the 183-GHz water vapor absorption line, imagery in a single channel near 90 GHz for precipitation measurements (when combined with higher resolution water vapor channels), and a single channel near 205 GHz that is more sensitive to cloud-sized ice particles. Each TROPICS netCDF file contains a granule of data with 81 spots and approximately 2880 scans, where a granule is defined as an orbit's worth of data.

Get the data

tropics01anttl1a_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="TROPICS01ANTTL1A",
    version="1.0",
    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.