Land surface product development for GOES-R satellite mission

On board the U.S. GOES-R satellite, which has a planned launch-ready in 2015, the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) will provide a best-ever opportunity for measuring land surface parameters from geostationary orbit over America. Comparing to the current GOES Imager, ABI sensor has three major advantages for the land surface measurement: high horizontal resolution (2 km at nadir), more frequent refresh rate (e.g., 5 minutes for full disk mode) , and lower sensor noise level. It is expected that products generated from the GOES-R satellite will be significantly better than the current GOES Imager products. In 2010, Land team of the GOES-R Algorithm Working Group (AWG) reached its peak time of algorithm developments. There are six land surface products that are under development: land surface temperature (LST), fire detection and characterization (FDC), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), green vegetation fraction (GVF), land surface albedo (LSA), and flood/standing water (FSW). Among those, LST and FDC are required as baseline products of the GOES-R mission and NDVI, GVF, LSA, FSW are required as option 2 products. All the land products are generated from the ABI measurements, with some ancillary data needs. Currently, 100% readiness algorithm theoretical bases documents (ATBDs) and delivered algorithm packages (DAPs) for LST, FDC and NDVI have been delivered to the GOES-R program office (GPO), and are in implementation/installation process by vender. 80% readiness ATBDs and DAPs for GVF, LSA and FSW have been delivered also to GPO, and are under investigation by the vender; 100% readiness ATBDs and DAPs for GVF, LSA and FSW will be delivered in 2011. Meanwhile, all the ATBDs are sent to external reviewers, who are pointed by the GOES-R algorithm development executive board (ADEB), for the independent verification and validation (IV & V) process. Starting from late 2010, comprehensive validation process for the GOES-R land surface products have been activated for providing high quality validation datasets and tools.