Copernicus Sentinel-5P Mapping Portal
esa european commission

Sentinel-5P Aerosol Layer Height

This map is based on OPERATIONAL Sentinel-5P L2 products.

About Aerosol Layer Height

This online platform uses data from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite and shows the daily aerosol layer height across the globe, as well as monthly, seasonal and yearly moving averages.
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The TROPOMI Aerosol Layer Height product focuses on retrieval of vertically localised aerosol layers in the free troposphere, such as desert dust, biomass burning aerosol, or volcanic ash plumes. The height of such layers is retrieved for cloud-free conditions. Height information for aerosols in the free troposphere is particularly important for aviation safety. Scientific applications include radiative forcing studies, long-range transport modelling and studies of cloud formation processes. Aerosol height information also helps to interpret the UV Aerosol Index (UVAI) in terms of aerosol absorption as the index is strongly height-dependent.

The aerosol layer height map shown here is measured by the Tropomi instrument on the Sentinel 5 Precursor satellite. The Tropomi measurements are performed in the visible part of the spectrum. More information on the Tropomi aerosol index measurements and quality assessment can be found in the Product Readme file.

About this S5P-PAL map

The maps shown on this site have been based on collection 3 of the Sentinel-5P Aerosol Layer Height Level-2 products (L2__AER_LH), available from the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem. The readme file of this product can be found here.
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The Copernicus Sentinel-5P aerosol layer height measurements were first filtered based on the recommendation in the Product Readme file (only data with a qa_value > 0.5 was used). Then the measurements are mapped on a fixed latitude-longitude grid of 8193 x 16385 pixels. The grid is turned into an EPSG:4326 geotiff file using the appropriate color scale, which is again turned into an EPSG:3857 tile map.

Please note that due to the quality filtering, some gaps appear in these Aerosol Layer Height maps where VIIRS data is unavailable. More info can be found here.

The maps and underlying Level-3 gridded data files were generated by S5P-PAL. The Level-3 data can be downloaded from the S5P-PAL Data Portal, or directly via the download button below the map.


This service is provided as part of the Sentinel-5P Product Algorithm Laboratory (S5P-PAL)
and contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data processed by S[&]T.

Questions regarding this service can be send to the ESA EO Support Helpdesk.