Public Release of a New Aura-OMI Global Atmospheric NO2 Product

The Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC), in collaboration with OMI Principal Investigators Nickolay Krotkov (GSFC-NASA, US) & Pepijn J. Veefkind (KNMI, Netherlands), is pleased to announce the release of  a new OMI daily global gridded Level-3 nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) product, ‘OMNO2d’. The Ozone Monitoring instrument (OMI) is a contribution of the Netherlands Space Office (NSO) in collaboration with Finish Meteorological Institute (FMI) to the NASA EOS-Aura Mission.

Atmospheric nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) is an important trace gas in the Earth’s atmosphere. NO₂ occurs naturally in the free troposphere (due to lightning) and in the stratosphere. It plays a major role in the destruction of ozone in the middle stratosphere and is a major precursor of tropospheric smog (high surface ozone and particulate levels).

In the stratosphere, NO₂ is mainly produced by photo-dissociation of NO₂ reservoir species. In the lower troposphere and near surface, the primary sources of NO₂ production are industrial and automobile combustion processes and biomass burning. These sources, together with emission from the soil, account for most of the NO₂ in the atmosphere.

 The OMNO2d data product provides daily total and tropospheric cloud screened NO₂ column data, a weighted average over 0.25° x 0.25^o latitude-longitude global grids. (http://disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/Aura/data-holdings/OMI/omno2d_v003.shtml ).

This Global Gridded NO₂ product is most recent addition to other OMI Level-3 atmospheric products that have been released earlier, and which contain many climate and air quality related parameters, such as Total Column Ozone, Aerosol Optical Thickness, Aerosol Index, Sulfur Dioxide, UV-B Surface Irradiance and Erythemal Daily Dose. Information for all OMI data products is available from the GES DISC OMI web site, http://disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/Aura/data-holdings/OMI/

For the full set of Aura data products available from the GES DISC, please see the link: http://disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/Aura/data-holdings/. On-line data analysis capabilities have also been made available in the GES DISC Giovanni (http://giovanni.gsfc.nasa.gov/).