ESSIC/CISESS Senior Faculty Specialist Sirish Uprety and Associate Research Scientist Xi Shao are co-authors on a new paper about radiometric consistency between the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) onboard the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) and NOAA-20 satellites.
The VIIRS onboard the S-NPP and NOAA-20 satellites has been providing critical weather and climate-related data. With the launch of NOAA-20 in November 2017, the global coverage of VIIRS has doubled. In order to conduct long-term environmental studies, these instruments must have consistent radiometric calibration. In the study, titled “Radiometric consistency between GOES-16 ABI and VIIRS on Suomi NPP and NOAA-20”, Uprety and Shao quantify the radiometric consistency between the two VIIRS instruments through double differencing using GOES-16 Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) as a reference instrument.
The researchers found that the NOAA-20 VIIRS measured top-of-atmosphere reflectance is consistently lower than the S-NPP VIIRS. The GOES-16 ABI observed reflectance is higher than that observed by both the VIIRS instruments. These differences exist due to calibration uncertainties in VIIRS and ABI, the time difference between the VIIRS and ABI observations, differences in cloud contamination, uncertainties in spectral response function differences correction, and lack of in-situ hyperspectral data to account for the spectral bias more accurately.
Sirish Uprety received MS degree in electrical engineering from South Dakota State University, USA, in 2009. He is a member of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) calibration/validation support team at CISESS, University of Maryland, College Park, USA. He is primarily working on the postlaunch calibration and validation of VIIRS onboard S-NPP and NOAA-20 satellites.
Xi Shao received his BS degree in physics from the University of Science and Technology of China, China (1996), PhD in astronomy, and MS in EE from The University of Maryland, USA (2004). He is an associate research scientist with the Department of Astronomy and Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites, The University of Maryland. He supports radiometric calibration/validation of Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument and Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) onboard NOAA satellites.
To access the article, click here: “Radiometric consistency between GOES-16 ABI and VIIRS on Suomi NPP and NOAA-20”.
