Accessing Near Real Time Air Quality Products via AerosolWatch

NOAA generates near real time satellite-derived air quality products for various applications including operational air quality forecasting. These products are made available through an interactive and user friendly website called AerosolWatch (https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/smcd/spb/aq/AerosolWatch/). The current suite of products include aerosol optical depth (AOD), dust/smoke mask, GeoColor Imagery, Dust RGB imagery, fire temperature RGB, fire hot spots, Fire Radiative Power (FRP), and surface PM2.5 estimates from AOD. The two main sensors that provide these products are Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) on new generation geostationary satellites and Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on polar-orbiting satellites. The ABI on GOES-16 and GOES-17 provide the products at 10-minute temporal resolution and 2 km spatial resolution. The VIIRS on NOAA-20 and Suomi NPP provde the products once a day at 750 m resolution. The products available through AerosolWatch are utilized daily by operational air quality forecasters, academic and industry users, and science community during field campaigns. The website allows users to access still images, multi-step animation of images of Continental United States (CONUS) or Full Disk (FD) covering the North and South Americas, do overlays of AOD and smoke/dust mask on GeoColor imagery etc. In this paper, a tutorial of the website showcasing various imagery and how to access data files will be presented.