Overview

We estimate annual and monthly ground-level fine particulate matter (PM₂.₅) total and compositional mass concentrations over North America for 1998-2023 by combining Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) retrievals (Dark Target, Deep Blue, MAIAC, and SNPP VIIRS) that make use of observations from numerous satellite-based NASA instruments (MODIS/Terra, MODIS/Aqua, MISR/Terra, SeaWiFS/SeaStar, VIIRS/SNPP, and VIIRS/NOAA20) with the GEOS-Chem chemical transport model, and subsequently calibrating ground-based observations using a residual Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), as detailed in the below reference for V6.NA.01.

View dataset

Annual and monthly datasets are provided in NetCDF [.nc] format. Gridded files use the WGS84 projection. Latitude centers on the 0.01°×0.01° grid range from 10.005 °N to 69.995 °N and longitude centers range from 169.995 °W to 40.005 °W. Please contact our Support Team (support@satpm.org) for further information.

Note that these estimates are primarily intended to aid in large-scale studies. Annual and coarse-resolution averages correspond to a simple mean of within-grid values. Gridded datasets are provided to allow users to agglomerate data as best meets their particular needs. High-resolution (0.01° × 0.01°) datasets are gridded at the finest resolution of the information sources that were incorporated but are unlikely to fully resolve PM₂.₅ gradients at the gridded resolution due to influence by information sources at coarser resolution.

Note that a VPN may be necessary to access the Box data repositories, depending on local web traffic restrictions.

Reference and citation

Shen, S. Li, C. van Donkelaar, A. Jacobs, N. Martin, R. V.: Enhancing Estimation of Fine Particulate Matter Chemical Composition across North America by Including Geophysical A Priori Information in Deep Learning with Uncertainty Quantification. (2026) ACS ES&T Air Article ASAP. DOI: 10.1021/acsestair.5c00251. Link