Articles | Volume 10, issue 4
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-10-1425-2017
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-10-1425-2017
Research article
 | 
13 Apr 2017
Research article |  | 13 Apr 2017

Cross-calibration of S-NPP VIIRS moderate-resolution reflective solar bands against MODIS Aqua over dark water scenes

Andrew M. Sayer, N. Christina Hsu, Corey Bettenhausen, Robert E. Holz, Jaehwa Lee, Greg Quinn, and Paolo Veglio

Abstract. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) is being used to continue the record of Earth Science observations and data products produced routinely from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) measurements. However, the absolute calibration of VIIRS's reflected solar bands is thought to be biased, leading to offsets in derived data products such as aerosol optical depth (AOD) as compared to when similar algorithms are applied to different sensors. This study presents a cross-calibration of these VIIRS bands against MODIS Aqua over dark water scenes, finding corrections to the NASA VIIRS Level 1 (version 2) reflectances between approximately +1 and −7 % (dependent on band) are needed to bring the two into alignment (after accounting for expected differences resulting from different band spectral response functions), and indications of relative trending of up to  ∼  0.35 % per year in some bands. The derived calibration gain corrections are also applied to the VIIRS reflectance and then used in an AOD retrieval, and they are shown to decrease the bias and total error in AOD across the mid-visible spectral region compared to the standard VIIRS NASA reflectance calibration. The resulting AOD bias characteristics are similar to those of NASA MODIS AOD data products, which is encouraging in terms of multi-sensor data continuity.

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Short summary
The satellite instrument VIIRS is being used to carry on observations of the Earth made by older satellites like MODIS. Data sets created from these satellite observations depend on the quality of the satellite instruments' calibration. This paper describes a comparison between the calibration of these two sensors. MODIS is believed to be more reliable and so VIIRS is corrected to bring it in line with MODIS. These corrections are shown to improve the quality of VIIRS aerosol data.