Sentinel-5P OFFL HCHO: Offline Formaldehyde

OFFL/L3_HCHO

This dataset provides offline high-resolution imagery of atmospheric formaldehyde (HCHO) concentrations.

Formaldehyde is an intermediate gas in almost all oxidation chains of non-methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOC), leading eventually to CO₂. Non-Methane Volatile Organic Compounds (NMVOCs) are, together with NO_x, CO and CH₄, among the most important precursors of tropospheric O₃. The major HCHO source in the remote atmosphere is CH₄ oxidation. Over the continents, the oxidation of higher NMVOCs emitted from vegetation, fires, traffic and industrial sources results in important and localized enhancements of the HCHO levels. The seasonal and inter-annual variations of the formaldehyde distribution are principally related to temperature changes and fire events, but also to changes in anthropogenic activities. HCHO concentrations in the boundary layer can be directly related to the release of short-lived hydrocarbons, which mostly cannot be observed directly from space. More information.

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 'tropospheric_HCHO_column_number_density_validity>50;derive(datetime_stop {time})'
S5P_OFFL_L2__HCHO___20190116T171037_20190116T185207_06531_01_010105_20190123T104749.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 'tropospheric_HCHO_column_number_density_validity>50;derive(datetime_stop {time});
bin_spatial(2001, 50.000000, 0.01, 2001, -120.000000, 0.01);
keep(tropospheric_HCHO_column_number_density,
     tropospheric_HCHO_column_number_density_amf,
     HCHO_slant_column_number_density,cloud_fraction,sensor_altitude,
     sensor_azimuth_angle, sensor_zenith_angle,solar_azimuth_angle,
     solar_zenith_angle)'
S5P_OFFL_L2__HCHO___20190116T171037_20190116T185207_06531_01_010105_20190123T104749.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).