Summary

Description

The second release of Collection 3 OMI/Aura level-2G daily global gridded (0.25x0.25 deg) Aerosol data product OMAEROG (Version 003 has been made available to the public in March 2012 from the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC), see http://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/Aura/OMI/omaerog_v003.shtml OMI provides two aerosol products OMAERUV and OMAERO that are based on two different algorithms. The OMAERUV product uses the near-UV algorithm. The OMAERO product is based on the multi-wavelength algorithm that uses up to 20 wavelength bands between 331 nm and 500 nm. OMAERO retrieval algorithm is developed by the KNMI OMI Team Scientists. Drs. Deborah Stein-Zweers, Martin Sneep and Pepijn Veefkind are now the key investigators of this product. The OMAERO product contains Aerosol Optical Depths, Single Scatterin Albedo and other ancillary and geolocation informations. (The shortname for this Level-2G Global Gridded Aerosol Product is OMAEROG_V003) This Level-2G daily global gridded product OMAEROG is based on the pixel level OMI Level-2 Aerosol product OMAERO. OMAEROG is a special Level-2 gridded product where pixel level products are binned into 0.25x0.25 degree global grids. It contains the data for all scenes that have observation time betweeen UTC times of 00:00:00 and 23:59:59.9999 . All data pixels that fall in a grid box are saved without averaging. Scientist can apply data filtering scheme of their choice and create new gridded products. The GES DISC developed interactive tool Giovanni ( http://giovanni.gsfc.nasa.gov/ ) provides web based capabilities to browse and explore these data. The OMAEROG data product contains almost all parameters that are contained in OMAERO. For example, in addition to the extinction optical depth, single scattering albedo it also contains aerosol indices, cloud fraction, cloud pressure, terrain height, geolocation, solar and satellite viewing angles, and extensive quality flags. OMAEROG files are stored in EOS Hierarchical Data Format (HDF-EOS5). Each file contains daily data from approximately 15 orbits . The maximum file size for the OMAEROG data product is about 78 Mbytes.