Atmospheric · live

Industrial activity from space

Atmospheric NO₂ measures how hard factories and traffic are running.

—

n/a vs Same-week 3-year mean (cloud-filtered)

Observed: no observation yet · Source publishes weekly, ~5-day lag.

Atmospheric · China industrial corridor

Factory activity, seen from 700 km up

LIVE · NASA GIBS

ATMOSPHERIC · CHINA NO₂

SAT Aura · OMI · L3 daily

RESOLUTION ~14 km / pixel

COMPOSITE 5d (2026-08-12 → 2026-08-16)

PLAYING 2026-08-16 · 1.4 s/frame

TICK 21:50:32 UTC

RED = active factories & diesel trucks emitting NO₂ · darker red = denser industry

COORD —

NO₂ NO DATA

NO₂ DENSITY

low → high

T −

freshest

VECTORIAL · SIGNALS

Red plumes = tropospheric NO₂ — the gas factories and diesel trucks emit. More red = more industry running. The same signal that flagged Wuhan's slowdown two weeks before official data in Jan 2020.

Composite: 5d rolling · 2026-08-12 → 2026-08-16·Equity anchors: BABA · JD · PDD·Source: NASA Earthdata GIBS

Translation

The *TROPOMI* satellite — ESA's Sentinel-5P — measures *NO₂*, a gas emitted by engines and power plants. More NO₂ over an industrial region = more economic activity. It's the signal that flagged Wuhan's slowdown two weeks before official data in January 2020.

Methodology

Source

ESA Sentinel-5P TROPOMI via Sentinel Hub Statistical API

Cadence

Weekly

Sensors / APIs

Sentinel Hub Statistical API, TROPOMI NO₂ L2 product

AOI

20 industrial AOIs (Wuhan, Shanghai, Detroit, LA, Houston, Antwerp, Mumbai, etc.) — pre-defined GeoJSON polygons

Baseline

Same-week 3-year mean (cloud-filtered)

Uncertainty

Cloud cover gates the signal — clouded weeks publish "no signal" rather than fake reads

Known biases

TROPOMI revisit gap: 1-2 days at mid-latitudes
Weather (wind speed, boundary-layer height) modulates NO₂ residence time
Diesel-truck traffic confounds factory-only attribution

Provenance

Source URL: https://sentinel.esa.int/web/sentinel/missions/sentinel-5p
License: Modified Copernicus Licence

For developers and AI agents

/signals/tropomi-no2-economic/brief.md — LLM-citable markdown
/api/signals/tropomi-no2-economic — JSON + JSON-LD Dataset