Status and Validation of S-NPP and NOAA-20 VIIRS Ice Products

The cryosphere exists at all latitudes an in about one hundred countries. Among all the properties of the cryosphere, ice cover, ice concentration, ice thickness, and sea ice leads are among most important. The availability, consistency and accuracy of sea ice products are critical for a wide range of applications including climate monitoring and modeling, weather forecasting, shipping, fisheries, and hazard mitigation. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) onboard the Suomi NPP (S-NPP) and NOAA-20 provides cryosphere products, an important part of the Environmental Data Records (EDR). These cryosphere products includes ice surface temperature, ice concentration, and ice thickness and ice characterization. NOAA Enterprise algorithms are employed to generate these products. Cryosphere products are fundamental to weather prediction, hazard detection, transportation, recreation, and climate monitoring.

NESDIS/STAR provides the managerial and technical leadership of the S-NPP and NOAA-20 VIIRS cryosphere product development and evaluation activities. In this presentation, we will present the current status of the cryosphere Enterprise algorithms, evaluation/validation activities of all the cryosphere ice products, and future validation plans for NOAA-20. Validation work shows that VIIRS ice surface temperature uncertainty meets or exceeds the system requirement of 1.0 K based on comparison with measurements in IceBridge; VIIRS ice concentration is validated using observations from Landsat 8, and results show an overall bias of 0.3% with an uncertainty of 9.5%; sea ice thickness and characterization shows best agreement with measurements from IceBridge in comparison with retrievals from other satellite sensors.