Earthdata Forum

On Mar 07, 2017

I am working on a project that aims to find the Aerosol Optical Thickness over the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. My group is studying the intra-urban region, and wants to use the MAIAC ALGORITHM on MOD04 MODIS AEROSOL PRODUCTS. I wants to visualize the data using the Panoply application but can not find a tutorial or user's guide for using Panoply. Please help me learn how to visualize the MODIS MOD04 L2 AEROSOL DATA.

On Mar 07, 2017 Robert Schmunk posted

There is unfortunately no official user’s guide. There are some alternatives:

A quick intro to Panoply 3 by a student in Germany (but written in English):
https://www.geo.uni-bremen.de/Interdynamik/images/stories/pdf/visualizing_netcdf_panoply.pdf

There are also some Panoply “recipes” in the GES DISC DAAC website’s cookbook. See
https://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/recipes/?q=recipe-cookbook
and page down to the last half dozen items in the list.

It is important to note that if the dataset does not tag the data with attributes in a convention understood by Panoply, then it may not be able to plot the data or may only do so poorly. I note that the MODIS website (atmosphere-imager.gsfc.nasa.gov/MOD04_L2/acquiring.html) indicates that MOD04_L2 product is in HDF format. Depending on the age of the datasets, Panoply may not be able to do much with them, as it hasn’t been until relatively recently that HDF dataset producers have begun to more regularly use metadata conventions that are understood by tools such as Panoply, IDV, etc. That said, I did download the sample MOD04_L2 file (atmosphere-imager.gsfc.nasa.gov/MOD04_L2/acquiring.html) and Panoply was able to plot many of the Data Fields in that file.