7 August 2020 Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System strategy for intercalibrating the new-generation geostationary visible imagers
Rajendra Bhatt, David R. Doelling, Conor O. Haney, Douglas A. Spangenberg, Benjamin R. Scarino, Arun Gopalan
Author Affiliations +
Abstract

The advanced baseline imager (ABI) instrument onboard Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)-16 is the first of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA’s) new-generation geostationary earth orbiting (GEO) imagers that provides high-quality calibrated and geolocated Earth observations in six reflective solar bands (RSBs). The spectral similarity between the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) and ABI RSB offers an opportunity for deriving VIIRS-quality cloud retrievals from the ABI radiances. NASA’s Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) project utilizes GEO imager (including ABI) radiances to retrieve clouds and derive broadband fluxes that are used to account for the regional diurnal flux variation between the CERES measurements and to convert the CERES observed radiances into fluxes. In order to derive a seamless cloud and flux datasets for CERES, it is important that the GEO, MODIS, and VIIRS imagers are all placed on the same radiometric scale. We describe an absolute radiometric intercomparison between the NOAA-20 VIIRS and GOES-16 ABI RSB using ray-matched radiance/reflectance pairs over all-sky tropical ocean scenes as well as a deep convective cloud invariant target calibration algorithm. Results indicate that the ABI and VIIRS RSB calibration are within 5%, except for the 0.47-μm band, for which the radiometric inconsistency is found to be ∼7  %  . The GOES-16 radiometric scaling factors referenced to NOAA-20 VIIRS were computed from the two independent calibration methods to agree within 1% for ABI bands 1 to 4, and within 3% for bands 5 and 6. Results from this study were used to propose a future CERES GEO intercalibration algorithm referenced to NOAA-20 VIIRS, given the eventual demise of the Terra and Aqua satellites.

© 2020 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) 1931-3195/2020/$28.00 © 2020 SPIE
Rajendra Bhatt, David R. Doelling, Conor O. Haney, Douglas A. Spangenberg, Benjamin R. Scarino, and Arun Gopalan "Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System strategy for intercalibrating the new-generation geostationary visible imagers," Journal of Applied Remote Sensing 14(3), 032410 (7 August 2020). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JRS.14.032410
Received: 28 February 2020; Accepted: 23 July 2020; Published: 7 August 2020
Lens.org Logo
CITATIONS
Cited by 5 scholarly publications.
Advertisement
Advertisement
RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS
Get copyright permission  Get copyright permission on Copyright Marketplace
KEYWORDS
Calibration

Clouds

Reflectivity

Imaging systems

Bidirectional reflectance transmission function

Satellites

Short wave infrared radiation

Back to Top