VIIRS Day/Night Band—Correcting Striping and Nonuniformity over a Very Large Dynamic Range

Abstract

Abstract:The Suomi National Polar-orbiting (NPP) Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Day-Night Band (DNB) measures visible and near-infrared light extending over seven orders of magnitude of dynamic range. This makes radiometric calibration difficult. We have observed that DNB imagery has striping, banding and other nonuniformities-day or night. We identified the causes as stray light, nonlinearity, detector crosstalk, hysteresis and mirror-side variation. We found that these affect both Earth-view and calibration signals. These present an obstacle to interpretation by users of DNB products. Because of the nonlinearity we chose the histogram matching destriping technique which we found is successful for daytime, twilight and nighttime scenes. Because of the very large dynamic range of the DNB, we needed to add special processes to the histogram matching to destripe all scenes, especially imagery in the twilight regions where scene illumination changes rapidly over short distances. We show that destriping aids image analysts, and makes it possible for advanced automated cloud typing algorithms. Manual or automatic identification of other features, including polar ice and gravity waves in the upper atmosphere are also discussed. In consideration of the large volume of data produced 24 h a day by the VIIRS DNB, we present methods for reducing processing time.

Mesospheric Bore Observations Using Suomi-NPP VIIRS DNB during 2013–2017

“…The sensor collects images via a cross-track scanning pattern using a 16-detector stack. Each detector of this stack is assembled from a scan-angle-dependent aggregation of an array of sub-detectors in the along-and cross-track dimensions, incorporating time-delay integration (TDI) to achieve low-light sensitivity and nearly constant pixel resolution [22][23][24]. Each scan of this detector stack forms a ∼12 km belt in track swath, and adjacent scans are ∼1.78 s apart.…”

An Overview of the Science Performances and Calibration/Validation of Joint Polar Satellite System Operational Products

“…This enabled the VIIRS Day/Night band to detect low cloud structures that revealed the true center of low-level circulation associated with Hurricane Flossie. The DNB has been proved to be useful for many applications including tropical cyclone analysis and forecasting, night fire products, nighttime aerosol retrievals, mapping of city lights/power outage detection, boat detections, and detection of airglow gravity waves, among other events [31][32][33][34][35][36].…”

“…This enabled the VIIRS Day/Night band to detect low cloud structures that revealed the true center of low-level circulation associated with Hurricane Flossie. The DNB has been proved to be useful for many applications including tropical cyclone analysis and forecasting, night fire products, nighttime aerosol retrievals, mapping of city lights/power outage detection, boat detections, and detection of airglow gravity waves, among other events [31][32][33][34][35][36]. In addition to the EDR imagery products, the VIIRS product suite contains a wide variety of geophysical products (i.e., EDRs), include those for atmosphere (e.g., aerosol optical thickness, AOT; aerosol detection products, ADP), land (e.g., variety of vegetation indices, VI; green vegetation fraction, GVF; land surface temperature, LST), ocean (e.g., sea surface temperature, SST; ocean color, OC), and cryosphere (e.g., ice surface temperature, IST; sea ice thickness, concentration; snow fraction, polar winds).…”

Improved NOAA-20 Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite Day/Night Band Image Quality by Upgraded Gain Calibration

“…In recent years, several efforts have been devoted to evaluating the causes of striping in the Suomi-NPP VIIRS DNB imagery. It is reported that residual stray light, reflectance difference between two sides of the half angle mirror (HAM), electronic effects, and detector nonlinearity are major causes of the striping [18]. Two updated methods, which are the automatic correction based on light contamination ranking index [19] and the fused correction combined from the historic stray light estimates [20], were developed recently to improve stray light correction in twilight regions.…”

“…Two updated methods, which are the automatic correction based on light contamination ranking index [19] and the fused correction combined from the historic stray light estimates [20], were developed recently to improve stray light correction in twilight regions. Although an algorithm based on the histogram matching method was proposed to de-stripe DNB observations collected during both day and night, it is a post-processing step to the operational production of the calibrated DNB radiances that requires additional time [18]. Methods for striping correction that can be implemented in the operational DNB calibration are preferred.…”