Daily Earth Maps from Space from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder
Global Ozone
Today's Near-Real-Time Satellite Feed
Last 3 Days Combined
Ozone in dobson units (DU), collected from Earth's surface to top-of-atmosphere
(1 DU = the amount of ozone that if compressed would be 10mm thick under standard temperature and pressure)
This maps show ozone that has been collected from Earth's surface to the top of the atmosphere, but does ozone concentrate more at certain levels?
Ozone is contained mostly in the stratosphere, located approximately between 6 and 31 miles (10 and 50 kilometers) in altitude. The lowermost "shell" of Earth's atmosphere is the troposphere, while the stratosphere is the next highest shell. In the troposphere, the temperature tends to decrease with altitude, while in the stratosphere, the temperature increases with altitude. This makes for a cold boundary between the troposphere and stratosphere, which is called the tropopause. When the tropopause dips towards Earth (which can happen due to low pressure weather system), the void is filled in by stratospheric air. This process will transport stratospheric ozone to lower altitudes, and the total amount of ozone will be higher in these regions.
Variations in the concentrations of ozone can be caused by changes in the tropopause height, Antarctic ozone depletion, and transport of ozone within the stratosphere.
What do the colors mean?
The color bar is the key to reading the map. The bar will tell you the darkest blue color in the map shows where ozone amounts are around 220 DU. Purple is approximately 320 DU, and pale yellow shows measurements of around 420 DU.
Why are there "stripes" of color in the real-time map?
The AIRS instrument on the Aqua satellite orbits Earth from pole to pole. Imagine if you held a beach ball and tried wrapping a ribbon around the ball, going from top to bottom then bottom to top. Depending on the width of the ribbon, it can take many loops to cover the entire ball. AIRS orbits Earth 15 times a day--not enough orbits for AIRS to completely cover the globe. The black areas between the colored stripes show where AIRS has not yet retrieved data. We call these areas "gores". The stripes in the map shows where AIRS collected data in it's orbital path. We call this stripe a "swath".
> View an Aqua satellite orbit animation
May take a few seconds to load
What do the black areas in the map signify?
In addition to the gores explained in the paragraph above, note that AIRS was designed to retrieve data in clear skies or skies with speckled or thin clouds. So black areas can also show where dense clouds have collected.
View Today's Data Granule Maps
AIRS data is sectioned into pieces called "granules".
DID YOU KNOW?
Ozone is very rare in our atmosphere, averaging about 3 molecules of ozone for every 10 million air molecules.