National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Product User GuidePI - Eric Vermote (NASA GSFC)
Product ATBD Co-Is: Belen Franch (UMD), Martin Claverie (UMD)

Development of the VIIRS climate quality surface reflectance product suite

The primary objective of this project is the development of a well-calibrated, high quality, daily, multispectral-land surface reflectance product from the VIIRS sensor, providing global land observations to meet the needs of NASA Earth System Science and Applied Sciences and continuity with the EOS-MODIS surface reflectance product. The VIIRS surface reflectance product is direct heritage from collection 5 MODIS. MODIS algorithm refinements from Collection 6 will be integrated into the VIIRS algorithm, and they will be shared with the NOAA JPSS project for possible inclusion in future versions of the operational NOAA product.

The choice for the aerosol model is either Urban/Smoke, Low or High absorption. For each aerosol model, we calculate the average quadratic difference (model residual) between the retrieved and predicted surface reflectances as:

where Ρ^s_red is the surface reflectance retrieved at 670 nm by using the optical thickness derived from 470 nm, and α_i,red are ratios between the 412nm, 443nm, 490nm, 2130nm bands and the 670nm band.

The aerosol model that is characterized by the smallest residual is then selected.

The products are provided in standard Hierarchical Data Format–Earth Observing System (HDF-EOS5) format. Currently, this collection is available from January 19, 2012 and forward.  Products from the VIIRS sensor aboard JPSS-1 (J1) will be also be available starting in mid-2023.

 

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