Vicarious calibration of S-NPP/VIIRS day-night band

Abstract

The Day Night Band (DNB) of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) onboard the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) satellite provides imagery of clouds and other Earth features over illumination levels ranging from full sunlight to quarter moon. In order to cover this extremely broad measurement range, the DNB employs four imaging arrays that comprise three gain stages. The low gain stage (LGS) gain values are determined by solar diffuser data. In operation, the medium and high gain stage values are determined by multiplying the LGS gains by the medium gain stage (MGS)/LGS and high gain stage (HGS)/LGS gain ratios, respectively. This paper demonstrates a scheme of using DNB observation of ground vicarious sites under lunar illumination at night to independently verify the radiometric accuracy of HGS of DNB. We performed vicarious calibration of DNB when S-NPP flies above the vicarious site such as Dome C in Antarctic and Greenland in northern hemisphere at night and the moon illuminates the site with lunar phase being more than half moon. Lunar spectral irradiance model as a function of Sun-Earth-Moon distances and lunar phase is used to assist the determination of top-of-atmosphere reflectance at the vicarious site. Analysis of the vicariously-derived reflectance from DNB observations show agreement with the reflectance derived from Hyperion observations of the vicarious sites.