The AHI/Himawari-08 Dark Target Aerosol 10-Min L2 Full Disk 10 km product, short-name XAERDT_L2_AHI_H08 is provided at 10-km spatial resolution (at-nadir) and a 10-minute full-disk cadence that typically yields about 142 granules over the daylit hours of a 24-hour period (there are no images produced at 02:20 or 14:20 UTC for navigation purposes). The Himawari-8 platform served in the operational Himawari position (near 140.7°E) between October 2014 and 13 December 2022. Himawari-9 replaced Himawari-8 and is currently operational. The Himawari-8/AHI collection record spans from January 2019 through 12th December 2022. The final 19 days of 2022 (December 13 through 31) are served by L2 products derived from the Himawari-9/AHI instrument.

The XAERDT_L2_AHI_H08 product is a part of the Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO)–Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) Dark Target Aerosol project under NASA’s Making Earth System Data Records for Use in Research Environments (MEaSUREs) program, led by Robert Levy, uses a special version of the MODIS Dark Target (DT) aerosol retrieval algorithm to produce Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) and other aerosol parameters derived independently from seven sensor/platform combinations, where 3 are in GEO and 4 are in LEO. The 3 GEO sensors include Advanced Baseline Imagers (ABI) on both GOES-16 (GOES-East) and GOES-17 (GOES-West), and Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI) on Himawari-8. The 4 LEO sensors include MODIS on both Terra and Aqua, and VIIRS on both Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20. Adding the LEO sensors reinforces a major goal of this project, which is to render a consistent science maturity level across DT aerosol products derived from both types and sources of orbital satellites.

The XAERDT_L2_AHI_H08 product, in netCDF4 format, contains 45 Science Data Set (SDS) layers that include 8 geolocation and 37 geophysical SDSs.

For more information consult LAADS product description page at:

https://ladsweb.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/missions-and-measurements/products/XAERDT_L2_AHI_H08

Or, Dark Target aerosol team Page at: https://darktarget.gsfc.nasa.gov/