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Full catalog/TROPICS01BRTTL1B
TROPICS01BRTTL1B·v1.0·dataset

Raw microwave brightness for tropical storms (TROPICS)

TROPICS01 Pathfinder L1B Orbital Geolocated Native-Resolution Brightness Temperatures V1.0
land NASA GES_DISC Level 1B active
In plain English

What it measures. Raw microwave brightness readings, meaning how much natural microwave energy the satellite recorded across channels tuned to temperature, water vapor, rain and cloud ice, at the sensor's native resolution.

How it's made. Comes from the millimeter-wave sounder on the TROPICS Pathfinder, a small experimental satellite, processed to the calibrated brightness-measurement stage with location data attached.

How & where you'd use it. A foundational input for studying tropical cyclones, used to build the temperature, humidity and rainfall pictures of storms rather than read directly by most people.

What's measured

SPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › MICROWAVE › ANTENNA TEMPERATURE

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2021-07-19 → ongoing
  • Measured byTROPICS/01 (TMS)
  • Processing levelLevel 1B
  • Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
  • StatusACTIVE

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

tropics01brttl1b_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="TROPICS01BRTTL1B",
    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.