Overview of Suomi NPP Sensor Data Records from CrIS, ATMS, VIIRS and OMPS

There are five instruments on board the Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership (SNPP) satellite: Visible/Infrared Imager/Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), Cross-track Infrared Sounder (CrIS), Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS), Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS), and Cloud and Earth Radiant Energy System (CERES). These five instruments were designed to meet the national requirements on observing a suite of the earth and atmospheric parameters. Intensive calibration and validation started since the SNPP launch on October 28, 2011. After two years of intensive calval studies, the on-orbit performances of all the instruments are well characterized with a good knowledge of calibration accuracy, precision and stability. The SNPP SDR products have reached a full validated maturity level at which all the calval tasks are completed and the data is ready for operational uses and research publications. During the intensive calval period, the SDR teams have also developed many innovative techniques for characterizing the instrument performance and improving the bias corrections. Numerous SDR processing bugs are fixed and the data quality flags are monitored correctly in the data streams. A special issue on SNPP calval has been published on AGU Journal of Geophysical Research in 2013. NOAA Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR) also upgraded its Integrated CalVal System (ICVS) for long term monitoring of SNPP instruments. The ICVS enterprise capabilities allow for NOAA real-time monitoring of instrument health and status, supporting the NOAA critical operations such as JPSS gap mitigation, and detection of instrument anomaly and analyzing the root-cause. In STAR ICVS, several subsystems are being developed, tested and implemented for operations, including ATMS radiance transformation system (ARTS) and CrIS Interferometry Transformation System (CITS).