Oct. 10, 2019, 8 a.m.

Project: MISR

The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) project and the NASA Langley Atmospheric Science Data Center (ASDC) announce that a new publication describing the latest versions of the MISR Level 2 (L2) Aerosol Product and the Level 3 (L3) Component Global Aerosol Product is now available for discussion in the journal Atmospheric Measurement Techniques.

The publication describes the heritage of the MISR aerosol products, the motivations for the new product version, major changes to the underlying algorithms and to the data products themselves, and initial results of evaluations of the new version. It also provides information of interest to users of both the previous and current MISR aerosol product versions, such as mappings of previous to current parameter and fieldnames. The discussion paper is accessible at https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-2019-340. Interested parties can post comments until November 26, 2019.

The new MISR L2 Aerosol Product contains per-orbit data fields with information on atmospheric aerosols, including aerosol optical depth, single scattering albedo, and Angstrom Exponent, reported on a 4.4 km horizontal grid, which represents a sixteen-fold increase in the spatial resolution relative to the previous version of the product. The new MISR L2 Land Surface Product contains per-orbit data fields for clear-sky land scenes including atmospherically corrected surface reflectance, leaf area index, and fractional absorbed photosynthetically active radiation, reported on a 1.1 km horizontal grid, as in the previous version. Both products are provided in NetCDF-4 format, which is compatible with HDF5, with significant formatting changes designed to make the products easier to use.

The MISR L3 products report the daily, monthly, and seasonal averages of fields from the corresponding MISR L2 data products at 0.5° resolution on a regular latitude-longitude grid. These products are also provided in NetCDF-4 format, and include formatting changes to the data fields to make them consistent with the updated L2 Aerosol and Land Surface products.

The MISR product offerings are available via the Direct Data Download by order through the online MISR Order and Customization Tool. Information about these products and details about product quality are available on the MISR Project Page on each product page under "View Related Information".