Trending of Suomi-NPP VIIRS radiometric performance with lunar band ratio

Xi Shao; Taeyoung Choi; Changyong Cao; Slawomir Blonski; Wenhui Wang; Yan Ban

doi:10.1117/12.2068474

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26 November 2014 Trending of Suomi-NPP VIIRS radiometric performance with lunar band ratio

Xi Shao, Taeyoung Choi, Changyong Cao, Slawomir Blonski, Wenhui Wang, Yan Ban

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Proceedings Volume 9264, Earth Observing Missions and Sensors: Development, Implementation, and Characterization III; 92640K (2014) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2068474
Event: SPIE Asia-Pacific Remote Sensing, 2014, Beijing, China

Abstract

Radiometric stability of the lunar surface and its smooth reflectance spectrum makes the moon an ideal target for calibrating satellite-based hyper/multi-band visible imagers, as demonstrated in several lunar calibration studies of satellite radiometers. Most of the lunar calibrations rely on using lunar irradiance models to calibrate satellite radiometers, which require the lunar irradiance model to be highly accurate. In this paper, we use Lunar Band Ratio (LBR) to trend satellite radiometer performance so that the usage of lunar irradiance model is not required. The LBR method is applied to monitor long term radiometric performance of VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) onboard Suomi-NPP. VIIRS observes moon at nearly the same lunar phase angle through Earth view during scheduled spacecraft maneuver. Total lunar digital number are calculated for each VIIRS reflective solar bands (RSBs) from lunar observations and one of the most stable bands of VIIRS such as M4 band is chosen as the reference band for calculating the band ratio. LBRs are compared with the degradation factors derived from VIIRS operational radiometric calibration of RSBs using onboard solar diffuser. The LBR analysis reveals that M6 and M7 degrade the fastest and agree well with the trending independently determined from onboard solar diffuser. For stable bands such as M3-M4 of VIIRS, the variation range of band ratios of M2/M4 and M3/M4 are all within 0.6%, indicating the LBR can be used to reveal the sub percent band to band stability. For M11 band of VIIRS, there have been large uncertainties in verifying its radiometric performance using vicarious ground targets. LBR of M11 provides an independent and useful radiometric stability monitoring tool for verifying the relative stability of M11 band. The LBR analysis also shows that band-to-band variability in the spectrally similar band pairs such as I2 vs. M7 and I3 vs. M10 of VIIRS are consistent within 0.2%. It is demonstrated that long-term performance monitoring of VIIRS instrument using LBR is an important part of the VIIRS lunar calibration for solar bands and can effectively reveal the degradation of instruments.

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Xi Shao, Taeyoung Choi, Changyong Cao, Slawomir Blonski, Wenhui Wang, and Yan Ban "Trending of Suomi-NPP VIIRS radiometric performance with lunar band ratio", Proc. SPIE 9264, Earth Observing Missions and Sensors: Development, Implementation, and Characterization III, 92640K (26 November 2014); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2068474

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