GEO-LEO Merged Deep Blue Aerosol Monthly 1 x 1 degree Gridded L3

The GEO-LEO Merged Deep Blue Aerosol Monthly 1 x 1 degree Gridded L3 product, short-name AERDB_M3_GEOLEO_Merged contains gridded Aerosol Optical Thickness (AOT) at 550 nm reference wavelength that are composited from the L3 daily product (AERDB_D3_GEOLEO_Merged). Please note that while the individual standalone gridded data layer for each instrument is calculated as the arithmetic mean, the merged AOT layer is derived via an error-weighted average approach. The final retrievals used in the aggregation process are QA-filtered best-estimate values for cells that are measured on the day of interest. Further, at least three such retrievals are required to render the validity of a grid cell on any given day. Each L3 daily aggregated datafile is spatially comprised of a 1˚ x 1˚ horizontal grid that exists for every 30 minutes. This first release of these products spans from May 2019 through April 2020 with a potential to generate additional temporal coverage in the future.

The Level-3 (L3) Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO)-Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) Merged Deep Blue Aerosol Daily 1 x 1-degree Gridded dataset is part of a 12-product suite produced by an Earth Science Research from Operational Geostationary Satellite Systems (ESROGSS)-funded project. The 12 products in this project include nine derived from three Geostationary Earth Observation (GEO) instruments and three from merged data from GEO and Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) instruments.

The AERDB_M3_GEOLEO_Merged product, in netCDF4 format, contains 16 GEO-LEO Merged Group Science Data Set (SDS) layers and 15 GEO and LEO SDS layers.