China is developing a new generation of geostationary meteorological satellites called Fengyun-4 (FY-4), which is planned for launch beginning in 2016. Following upon the current FY-2 satellite series, FY-4 will carry four new instruments: the Advanced Geosynchronous Radiation Imager (AGRI), the Geosynchronous Interferometric Infrared Sounder (GIIRS), the Lightning Mapping Imager (LMI), and the Space Environment Package (SEP). The first satellite of the FY-4 series launched on 11 December 2016 is experimental, and the following four or more satellites will be operational. The main objectives of the FY-4 series are to monitor rapidly changing weather systems and to improve warning and forecasting capabilities. The FY-4 measurements are aimed at accomplishing 1) high temporal and spatial resolution imaging in 14 spectral bands from the visible, near-infrared, and infrared (IR) spectral regions; 2) lightning imaging; and 3) high-spectral-resolution IR sounding observations over China and adjacent regions. FY-4 will also enhance the space weather monitoring and warning with SEP. Current products from FY-2 will be improved by FY-4, and a number of new products will also be introduced. FY-4’s sounding and imaging data will be used to improve applications in a wide range of ocean, land, and atmosphere monitoring plus forecasting extreme weather (especially typhoons and thunderstorms); overall, FY-4 will contribute to more accurate understanding and forecasting of China’s weather, climate, environment, and natural disasters. This new generation of Chinese geostationary weather satellites is being developed in parallel with the new generation of geostationary meteorological satellite systems from the international community of satellite providers and is intended to be an important contribution to the global observing system.

The level-1 (L1) radiance spectra from the first Geostationary Interferometric InfraRed Sounder (GIIRS) have been publicly available since January 2019. On account of the inherent observation characteristics, operation modes, and capabilities, a complete spectrum calibration method of GIIRS/L1 products is originally proposed to form the latest version (V3) algorithm for implementation. Particularly, four targeted improvements in three aspects are independently established: subsample location alignment to yield integrated interferograms in both forward and backward directions with almost zero phase, rough spectral scale unification as well as accurate spectral scale correction to resolve spectral non-uniformity due to a seriously asymmetric configuration of focal plane array, and an additional double-reflected compensation to mitigate the influence of non-ideal onboard blackbody reference upon radiometric accuracy. Preliminary assessments from both domestic and international sources indicate that the spectral and radiometric accuracies of the measured spectra from the latest GIIRS/L1 V3 algorithm show a well-behaved performance in both longwave (LW) and midwave (MW) bands, that is, lower than 10 ppm of spectral scale errors, which is of sufficient accuracy for numerical weather prediction use, and around 1 K for most uncontaminated channels within the LW band. However, non-linearity correction of interferograms and spectral quality improvements, especially for the MW band, should be developed further. In general, a feasible solution of spectrum calibration for a hyperspectral sounder on geostationary platform is provided in detail for reference, which is expected to benefit users of GIIRS data as well as designers responsible for L1 data processing of other similar sensors.

Radiometric calibration (RC) is an essential solution to guarantee measurements from infrared photonic sensors with certain accuracy, the main task of which is to determine the radiometric responsivity of sensor and usually be solved by comparing with some radiation source (i.e., blackbody), called source-based RC (SBRC). In addition to the complexity in manufacture, the nonideal characteristics of an available source will inevitably introduce unexpected uncertainties to reduce the final calibration accuracy by around 0.2–0.5 K in SBRC. Therefore, we propose an original source-independent RC (SIRC) principle based on modeling instead of comparing for SBRC, where the incident background radiation to detector, as a dominated factor influencing the responsivity characteristics of a photonic sensor, is modeled to implement RC for both two fundamental types (photoconductive and photovoltaic) of HgCdTe photonic detectors. The SIRC merely requires the temperature information of main components of a sensor other than some complex source and its assembly, and provides a traceable way at lower uncertainty costs relative to the traditional SBRC. The SIRC is being implemented in Fengyun-2 satellites since 2019, which ensures a long-term stable service of Chinese geostationary meteorological satellites for the global observation system under the framework of World Meteorological Organization. Moreover, a 20-year-period traceable Fengyun-2 dataset to be recalibrated with SIRC will benefit the further climate applications.

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