Further Recovering GOES-17 ABI Radiances and Imagery

The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) on the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES)-R series provides radiance measurements with finer resolution, faster cadence, higher accuracy, and in more spectral bands than the legacy GOES Imager. The first satellite in the series, GOES-16, has been operational and performing nominally as GOES-East since December 2017. The second, GOES-17, transitioned to operation as GOES-West in February 2019, despite a partial post-launch failure of the ABI cooling system that resulted in a unique set of radiometric calibration challenges in the unexpected thermal conditions. These challenges range from large radiometric biases and artifacts driven by diurnal swings in detector temperature, to more subtle periodic effects that occur even at stable (yet elevated) detector temperatures, involving interactions between radiometric and geometric calibration events, scan pattern, and detector configuration. To improve product radiometric performance during periods of rapidly changing detector temperature, a predictive calibration algorithm was developed to properly calibrate imagery collected between regular calibration events. The algorithm is described elsewhere.^[1],[2],[3] Following the development of the predictive calibration algorithm, implementation details and settings required for its successful and timely use in the operational ground system were resolved to yield a refined level 1b data product. Future refinements using new techniques, including machine learning, are being explored to recover additional temporal coverage.

Keywords ABI, GOES-17, calibration, radiometry

DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT A. Approved for public release. Distribution is unlimited.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under Air Force Contract No. FA8702-15-D-0001. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

[1] X. Wu, et al., “GOES-17 ABI L1b and CMI Products Performance”, 2019 Joint Satellite Conference - AMS, Boston, MA 2019

[2] Van Naarden, et al., “Optimization of GOES-17 Advanced Baseline Imager to Recover and Maximize Performance with Degraded Thermal System”, 2019 Joint Satellite Conference - AMS, Boston, MA, 2019

[3] McCorkel, et al., “GOES-17 Advances Baseline Imager Performance Recovery Summary”, IGARSS 2019, Yokohama, Japan, 2019