Sentinel-5P NRTI CO: Near Real-Time Carbon Monoxide

NRTI/L3_CO

This dataset provides near real-time high-resolution imagery of CO concentrations.

Carbon monoxide (CO) is an important atmospheric trace gas for understanding tropospheric chemistry. In certain urban areas, it is a major atmospheric pollutant. Main sources of CO are combustion of fossil fuels, biomass burning, and atmospheric oxidation of methane and other hydrocarbons. Whereas fossil fuel combustion is the main source of CO at northern mid-latitudes, the oxidation of isoprene and biomass burning play an important role in the tropics. TROPOMI on the Sentinel 5 Precursor (S5P) satellite observes the CO global abundance exploiting clear-sky and cloudy-sky Earth radiance measurements in the 2.3 μm spectral range of the shortwave infrared (SWIR) part of the solar spectrum. TROPOMI clear sky observations provide CO total columns with sensitivity to the tropospheric boundary layer. For cloudy atmospheres, the column sensitivity changes according to the light path. More information.

NRTI L3 Product

To make our NRTI L3 products, we use harpconvert to grid the data.

Example harpconvert invocation for one tile: harpconvert --format hdf5 --hdf5-compression 9 -a 'CO_column_number_density_validity>50;derive(datetime_stop {time}); bin_spatial(2001, 50.000000, 0.01, 2001, -120.000000, 0.01); keep(CO_column_number_density,H2O_column_number_density,cloud_height, sensor_altitude,sensor_azimuth_angle, sensor_zenith_angle, solar_azimuth_angle,solar_zenith_angle)' S5P_NRTI_L2__CO_____20181122T000018_20181122T000518_05741_01_010200_20181122T004844.nc output.h5

Sentinel-5 Precursor

Sentinel-5 Precursor is a satellite launched on 13 October 2017 by the European Space Agency to monitor air pollution. The onboard sensor is frequently referred to as Tropomi (TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument).

All of the S5P datasets, except CH₄, have two versions: Near Real-Time (NRTI) and Offline (OFFL). CH₄ is available as OFFL only. The NRTI assets cover a smaller area than the OFFL assets, but appear more quickly after acquisition. The OFFL assets contain data from a single orbit (which, due to half the earth being dark, contains data only for a single hemisphere).

Because of noise on the data, negative vertical column values are often observed in particular over clean regions or for low SO2 emissions. It is recommended not to filter these values except for outliers, i.e. for vertical columns lower than -0.001 mol/m^2.

The original Sentinel 5P Level 2 (L2) data is binned by time, not by latitude/longitude. To make it possible to ingest the data into Earth Engine, each Sentinel 5P L2 product is converted to L3, keeping a single grid per orbit (that is, no aggregation across products is performed).

Source products spanning the antimeridian are ingested as two Earth Engine assets, with suffixes _1 and _2.

The conversion to L3 is done by the harpconvert tool using the bin_spatial operation. The source data is filtered to remove pixels with QA values less than:

• 80% for AER_AI
• 75% for the tropospheric_NO2_column_number_density band of NO2
• 50% for all other datasets except for O3 and SO2

The O3_TCL product is ingested directly (without running harpconvert).