Sentinel-5P OFFL AER LH: Offline UV Aerosol Layer Height

OFFL/L3_AER_LH

This dataset provides offline high-resolution imagery of the UV Aerosol Index (UVAI), also called the Absorbing Layer Height (ALH).

The ALH is very sensitive to cloud contamination. However, aerosols and clouds can be difficult to distinguish, and ALH is computed for all FRESCO effective cloud fractions smaller than 0.05. Cloud masks are available from FRESCO and VIIRS, and are strongly recommended to filter for residual clouds. A sunglint mask is also available to screen sunglint regions, which are not filtered beforehand.

It is known that high surface albedos negatively influence the ALH, biasing the ALH towards the surface. In general, the ALH over (dark) oceans is considered reliable to within the requirement of 1000 m or 100 hPa. Over land, especially bright surfaces, the accuracy may be lower, and the use of the ALH product over bright surfaces like deserts is not advisable.

For this L3 AER_LH product, the aerosol_mid_pressure is calculated with a pair of measurements at the 354 nm and 388 nm wavelengths. The COPERNICUS/S5P/OFFL/L3_SO2 product has the absorbing_aerosol_index calculated using the 340 nm and 380 nm wavelengths.

OFFL L3 Product

To make our OFFL L3 products, we find areas within the product's bounding box with data using a command like this:

harpconvert --format hdf5 --hdf5-compression 9
-a 'aerosol_height_validity>50;derive(datetime_stop {time})'
S5P_OFFL_L2__AER_LH_20190404T042423_20190404T060554_07630_01_010300_20190410T062552.nc
grid_info.h5

We then merge all the data into one large mosaic (area-averaging values for pixels that may have different values for different times). From the mosaic, we create a set of tiles containing orthorectified raster data.

Example harpconvert invocation for one tile: harpconvert --format hdf5 --hdf5-compression 9 -a 'aerosol_height_validity>50;derive(datetime_stop {time}); bin_spatial(2001, 50.000000, 0.01, 2001, -120.000000, 0.01); keep(aerosol_height,aerosol_pressure,aerosol_optical_depth, sensor_zenith_angle,sensor_azimuth_angle,solar_azimuth_angle,solar_zenith_angle)' S5P_OFFL_L2__AER_LH_20190404T042423_20190404T060554_07630_01_010300_20190410T062552.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).