Introducing the New MISR Near Real-Time Aerosol Product

July 20, 2021, 8 a.m.

Project: MISR

Recently, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and NASA Langley Atmospheric Data Center (ASDC) released a new MISR near real-time (NRT) aerosol product, which is available within three hours of overpass. A paper that describes the development of the new NRT aerosol product and summarizes the differences between the NRT and the standard aerosol products has been accepted for publication in the journal of Atmospheric Measurement Techniques and is available at https://amt.copernicus.org/preprints/amt-2021-71/.

The MISR NRT aerosol products contain information on atmospheric aerosols, including optical depth, single scattering albedo, Angstrom exponent, and aerosol size. The MISR NRT retrieval strategy builds upon the MISR standard aerosol algorithm. NRT employs the same ancillary datasets as the initial FIRSTLOOK version of the standard product which is available within 2 days from acquisition. The key difference between the standard and NRT processing is in cloud screening: the NRT algorithm does not have access to cloud classifiers that are available in the standard algorithm, and which are generated during Level 1 and Level 2 cloud processing. As a result, in the NRT algorithm a threshold on the Aerosol Retrieval Confidence Index (ARCI) was adjusted to 0.18; the equivalent ARCI threshold in the FIRSTLOOK and standard processing is 0.15.

The NRT aerosol product is distributed in NetCDF format, which is compatible with many data processing software, including NASA’s Panoply, as well as with common modules in programming languages. The NRT aerosol product is now being produced on an ongoing basis and is archived for a window covering three months from the present day. These and all MISR product offerings are available from NASA’s Atmospheric Science Data Center. Information about these products and details about product quality are available on the MISR Data and Information Table.

Data Access Methods:

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Related URLS: https://asdc.larc.nasa.gov/project/MISR/MI2AS_AEROSOL_NRT_1