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Full catalog/XAERDT_L2_ABI_G17
XAERDT_L2_ABI_G17·v1·dataset

Haze, dust and smoke in the air (GOES-17, 10 km)

ABI/GOES-17 Dark Target Aerosol 10-Min L2 Full Disk 10 km
atmosphere NASA LAADS Level 2 netCDF-4
In plain English

What it measures. How much haze, dust and smoke is floating in the air over the Americas, reported as aerosol optical depth (a measure of how much these tiny particles dim sunlight passing through the atmosphere).

How it's made. Generated from the ABI camera on the GOES-17 weather satellite, which sits over a fixed view of the Western Hemisphere and snaps the full disk every 10 minutes, run through a NASA aerosol detection algorithm.

How & where you'd use it. Watching wildfire smoke, dust storms and pollution move across the day, and supporting air-quality monitoring with frequent updates from a stationary vantage point. Covers GOES-West observations from 2019 to early 2023.

What's measured

ATMOSPHERE › AEROSOLS › AEROSOL OPTICAL DEPTH/THICKNESSATMOSPHERE › AEROSOLS › AEROSOL OPTICAL DEPTH/THICKNESS › ANGSTROM EXPONENTATMOSPHERE › AEROSOLSATMOSPHERE › AEROSOLS › AEROSOL PARTICLE PROPERTIES

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2019-01-01 → 2023-01-01
  • Measured byGOES-17 (ABI)
  • Processing levelLevel 2
  • Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
  • FormatsnetCDF-4
  • StatusACTIVE

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

The ABI/GOES-17 Dark Target Aerosol 10-Min L2 Full Disk 10 km product, short-name XAERDT_L2_ABI_G17 is provided at 10-km spatial resolution (at-nadir) and a 10-minute full-disk cadence that typically yields about 144 granules over the daylit hours of a 24-hour period. The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite – GOES-17 served in the operational GOES-West position (near -137°W), from February 12, 2019, through January 4, 2023. The GOES-16/ABI collection record spans from January 2019 through December 2022. The XAERDT_L2_ABI_G17 product is a part of the Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO)–Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) Dark Target Aerosol project under NASA’s Making Earth System Data Records for Use in Research Environments (MEaSUREs) program, led by Robert Levy, uses a special version of the MODIS Dark Target (DT) aerosol retrieval algorithm to produce Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) and other aerosol parameters derived independently from seven sensor/platform combinations, where 3 are in GEO and 4 are in LEO. The 3 GEO sensors include Advanced Baseline Imagers (ABI) on both GOES-16 (GOES-East) and GOES-17 (GOES-West), and Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI) on Himawari-8. The 4 LEO sensors include MODIS on both Terra and Aqua, and VIIRS on both Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20. Adding the LEO sensors reinforces a major goal of this project, which is to render a consistent science maturity level across DT aerosol products derived from both types and sources of orbital satellites. The XAERDT_L2_ABI_G17 product, in netCDF4 format, contains 45 Science Data Set (SDS) layers that include 8 geolocation and 37 geophysical SDSs. For more information consult LAADS [product description page](https://ladsweb.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/missions-and-measurements/products/XAERDT_L2_ABI_G17) or [Dark Target aerosol team Page](https://darktarget.gsfc.nasa.gov/).

Get the data

xaerdt_l2_abi_g17_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="XAERDT_L2_ABI_G17",
    version="1",
    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 LAADS
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.