92nd American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting (January 22-26, 2012)

Tuesday, 24 January 2012: 8:30 AM
A Summary on NPP CrIS SDR Post-Launch Calibration and Validation Activities and Preliminary Results
Room 257 (New Orleans Convention Center )
Yong Han, NOAA, Camp Springs, MD; and D. Tremblay

The Cross-track Infrared Sounder (CrIS) is a Michelson interferometer instrument on board the National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project (NPP) satellite, scheduled to launch on October 25, 2011. It measures Infrared radiation from the Earth's atmosphere-surface system. The CrIS Sensor Data Record (SDR) software transform the raw interferograms into spectrally calibrated spectra in the three bands from 650 to 1095, 1210 to 1750 and 2155 to 2550 cm-1 with resolutions of 0.625, 1.25 and 2.5 cm-1, respectively. The CrIS SDR team, comprised by scientists and engineers from government institutes, universities and industrial companies, is responsible for the pre- and post-launch CrIS SDR Calibration and Validation (CalVal). Well calibrated CrIS SDR radiances are crucial to the numerical weather prediction (NWP) and atmospheric temperature and water vapor retrievals. The planned post-launch CalVal activities comprise three phases: (1) the Early Orbit Checkout (EOC), (2) Intensive Calibration/Validation (ICV) and (3) Long Term Monitoring (LTM), respectively. At the time of this presentation, the CalVal process will have passed the EOC phase and will be in the first month of the ICV phase, if NPP is launched on schedule. This presentation will provide a summary of the Cal/Val activities performed up to this time and the initial results. A summary of future CalVal activities in ICV and LTM will also be presented.

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