In-Flight NOAA-20 OMPS Sensor Data Calibration

This paper presents the in-flight sensor data calibration and validation of the NOAA-20 Ozone Mapping Profiler Suite (OMPS). Data from OMPS’s solar view and Earth observation have been collected to characterize in-flight instrument behavior. To evaluate OMPS calibration and validation methodologies, it is of our primary interest in understanding the OMPS orbital instrument behavior, including dark rate evolution, nonlinearity variation, stray light contamination and spectral wavelength shifts through 1 year operation. While focusing on the Sensor Data Records’ quality in terms of radiance errors, a comparison of sensor data accuracy is made between the Suomi-NPP OMPS and the NOAA-20 OMPS. Our results show that originally developed linearity calibration was inadequate to the NOAA-20 higher spatial resolution data, the modified calibration provides consistent Sensor Data Records (SDRs) and Environmental Data Records (EDRs) with an improved data accuracy of 2% in the Earth radiance retrieval. Evaluation of the NOAA-20 SDR data shows that the data quality is comparable to the Suomi-NPP OMPS data at the SDR level.