The Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA's Aura platform is a nadir-pointing imaging spectrometer that provides daily global measurements of Earth-atmosphere back scattered radiances. Since 2004, OMI has provided a record of total ozone and other atmospheric parameters related to stratospheric ozone chemistry and climate, continuing the record of NASA’s Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) instrument. It has been a key instrument for monitoring the recovery of the ozone layer in response to the phase out of ozone-depleting chemicals as agreed to in the Montreal Protocol.

Beyond ozone, OMI also measures criteria pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and aerosols. It observes in 1560 wavelength bands in the ultraviolet and visible spectral region (264 to 504 nm) at a spatial resolution of 13x24 km. Once a month, the instrument provides measurements in a spatial zoom mode at a resolution of 13 x 12 km. These measurements are used to retrieve column amounts of O3, NO2, SO2, and aerosols (four of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's six criteria pollutants), as well as HCHO, BrO, OClO, ozone profiles, effective cloud fraction and pressure, and surface erythemal UV-B irradiances.

Learn more about near real-time OMI data provided by NASA's Land, Atmosphere Near real-time Capability for Earth observation (LANCE).