Water vapor correction to improve the operational calibration for NOAA AVHRR/3 channel 2 (0.85 µm) over a desert target

Abstract

The Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometers (AVHRRs) flown on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) polar satellites have been providing invaluable data for Earth system science and global change studies. However, the use of AVHRR solar reflectance products (e.g., normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI)) is constrained by calibration uncertainty, largely owing to the lack of an on-orbit calibration device for solar reflectance channels. Since the mid-1990s, NOAA has been applying operational calibration to these channels using the time series of top-of-atmosphere (TOA) measurements of the Libyan Desert site. However, the assumed radiometric stability of Libyan Desert TOA measurements can be disrupted by short-term variations in atmospheric components, especially for AVHRR channel 2, which has a spectral response function covering water vapor absorption lines in the near-infrared (NIR) spectra. This study aims to improve the calibration accuracy of AVHRR channel 2 data by applying water vapor correction over the homogeneous desert target surface using the water vapor content (W) derived from the linear relationships between the AVHRR split-window temperature difference (ΔT) and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) NIR water vapor product. Results show that the linear ΔT–W relationship is affected by the temperature lapse rate at the satellite over-passing time and the spectral response functions of AVHRR split-window channels. Water vapor correction reduces the calibration uncertainty from 2.6%–3.5% to 1.7%–1.8%, and about 1.0% surface-based relative calibration accuracy is independent of the water vapor uncertainty introduced by the ΔT–W regression. Furthermore, the short-term variations in the channel 2 operational degradation rate are largely reduced after water vapor correction. Thus, implementing water vapor correction can improve the operational calibration accuracy for AVHRR channel 2.