SUOMI NPP/VIIRS: Improvements in land cover monitoring and socioeconomic services

The USA's Suomi Polar-Orbiting Partnership (SNPP) satellite launched in 2011, with its Visible-Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), signifies a new era of operational environmental spacecrafts, one of its goals is to improve land cover monitoring. Since VIIRS, in addition to accommodating the best technical and scientific features of its predecessors (AVHRR and MODIS), has new important features such as wider swath, sharper view at the swath's edge, faster data processing and availability, it will improve land cover and climate monitoring considerably, which will result in better environmental and socio-economic services provided to the global and regional communities. Specifically, SNPP and JPSS will address the impacts of changing climate and weather extremes on industries, water, energy, population health, and other resources and activities. This paper will discuss how these operational satellites will improve drought early detection, monitoring its features (intensity, duration, area etc) and prediction of agricultural losses; how to estimate and predict food shortages in order to avoid regional disturbances and political instability; how fast Earth natural resources deteriorate; if the current warm climate intensifies droughts and increase its area and duration. These climate services have become already available to global community. The discussion will also focus on continuity of space observations and development of several decades of data records.