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Full catalog/TROPICS06BRTTL1B
TROPICS06BRTTL1B·v1.0·dataset

Raw brightness readings from a storm-watching sensor (TROPICS)

TROPICS06 L1B Orbital Geolocated Native-Resolution Brightness Temperatures V1.0
land NASA GES_DISC Level 1B
In plain English

What it measures. Raw, calibrated readings of how warm the atmosphere and surface appear in microwave wavelengths, captured by a small storm-watching satellite. These brightness readings are the starting point before weather details are extracted.

How it's made. Collected by the TMS microwave sounder on a TROPICS pathfinder smallsat, which measures signals near oxygen and water-vapor wavelengths; this is the early-stage geolocated brightness product, one orbit per file.

How & where you'd use it. A building-block input used to derive temperature, humidity, and precipitation structure inside tropical cyclones. Most people would use the higher-level storm products built from it rather than this raw data.

What's measured

SPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › MICROWAVE › BRIGHTNESS TEMPERATURE

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2023-06-02 → 2025-03-15
  • Measured byTROPICS/06 (TMS)
  • Processing levelLevel 1B
  • 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

tropics06brttl1b_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="TROPICS06BRTTL1B",
    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.