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Full catalog/TEMPO_HCHO_L3
TEMPO_HCHO_L3·vV04·dataset

Formaldehyde in the air overhead, hourly over North America, from NASA's TEMPO sensor

TEMPO gridded formaldehyde total column V04 (PROVISIONAL)
atmosphere NASA LARC_CLOUD Level 3 active netCDF-4
In plain English

What it measures. Hourly maps of formaldehyde in the air over North America, reported as the total amount stacked up in a column of the atmosphere. Formaldehyde is a gas linked to vehicle exhaust, industry and natural plant emissions.

How it's made. Built from the TEMPO instrument watching North America from a fixed high orbit, by combining its east-to-west scans into a regular map grid across the day.

How & where you'd use it. Tracking air pollution and its sources hour by hour, since formaldehyde is a marker for the chemistry that forms smog. Note: this is a provisional product still being validated.

What's measured

ATMOSPHERE › AIR QUALITY › VOLATILE ORGANIC COMPOUNDSATMOSPHERE › ATMOSPHERIC CHEMISTRY › CARBON AND HYDROCARBON COMPOUNDS › FORMALDEHYDE

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2023-08-02 → ongoing
  • Measured byIS-40e (TEMPO)
  • Processing levelLevel 3
  • FormatsnetCDF-4
  • StatusACTIVE

What you can do with it

  • Map air pollutants — NO₂, aerosols, ozone
  • Track greenhouse gases and Earth's energy budget
  • Feed weather and air-quality analysis
Official description

Formaldehyde Level 3 (PROVISIONAL) files provide trace gas information on a regular grid covering the TEMPO field of regard for nominal TEMPO observations. Level 3 files are derived by combining information from all Level 2 files constituting a TEMPO East-West scan cycle. The files are provided in netCDF4 format, and contain information on formaldehyde vertical columns, ancillary data used in air mass factor calculations and reference sector or de-striping corrections, and retrieval quality flags. The re-gridding algorithm uses an area-weighted approach. These data reached provisional validation on December 9, 2024.

Get the data

tempo_hcho_l3_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="TEMPO_HCHO_L3",
    version="V04",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from LARC_CLOUD
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.