NOAA-21 VIIRS Thermal Emissive Bands Early On-Orbit Calibration Performance and Improvements

Details

• Journal Title:
  IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
• Personal Author:
  Wang, Wenhui ; Cao, Changyong ; Blonski, Slawomir
• NOAA Program & Office:
  NESDIS (National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service) ; CISESS (Cooperative Institute for Satellite Earth System Studies) ; STAR (Center for Satellite Applications and Research)
• Description:
  The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) onboard the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-21 (NOAA-21) satellite was launch on November 10, 2022, following the successful operations of the VIIRS onboard the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) and NOAA-20 satellites. This article presents NOAA-21 VIIRS thermal emissive bands (TEBs) early on-orbit calibration performance, including instrument temperature telemetry trending, TEB gains, noise, and calibration stability as well as biases in the NOAA operational sensor data records (SDR). Different from S-NPP and NOAA-20, NOAA-21 VIIRS TEBs have experienced distinct on-orbit gain changes during its early mission, caused by detector responsivity degradations, mid-mission outgassing (MMOG), and the cold focal plane assembly setpoint temperature switch. The calibration stability and biases of NOAA-21 VIIRS TEB SDRs were analyzed by intercomparing with co-located Cross-Track Infrared Sounder (CrIS) observed and gap-filled spectra. NOAA-21 TEB SDRs have been stable, except for small changes caused by known VIIRS or CrIS instrument setting or calibration updates. VIIRS longwave infrared (LWIR) bands agree with CrIS within 0.1 K; M13 agrees with CrIS ~0.13 K. Calibration parameters derived from the spacecraft pitch maneuver data were applied for the first time in the operational processing, and LWIR scan angle and scene temperature-dependent biases were effectively reduced after that update. Similar to S-NPP and NOAA-20 VIIRS, NOAA-21 VIIRS TEBs also exhibit calibration anomalies during the blackbody warm-up/cool-down (WUCD) tests. NOAA-21 WUCD bias correction coefficients were developed and deployed to the operations for supporting sea surface temperature (SST) applications.
• Source:
  IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 62, 1-13
• DOI:
  https://doi.org/10.1109/tgrs.2024.3458869
• ISSN:
  0196-2892 ; 1558-0644
• Format:
  pdf
• Publisher:
  Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
• Document Type:
  Journal Article
• Funding:
  Grant no. NA19NES4320002
• License:
  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Rights Information:
  CC BY
• Compliance:
  Library
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:e06d153dfe25abb30dfa243b151cdc016ed533df316d2a682e0f166309646e7d4d46f71c428f201a45562e6b4b5db198b9bae7c2ae9184118408baff6b706250
• Download URL:
  https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/67842/noaa_67842_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 6.27 MB ]