Land Long Term Climate Data Records from AVHRR, MODIS and VIIRS

The Land Long Term Climate Data Records project at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) generates, archives, and distributes high quality Climate Data Records (CDR) from data acquired by Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR), Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), and Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) for use in long term global climate change studies. The AVHRR portion of this CDR has been released by the NOAA National Climatic Data Center CDR project in Spring 2014. Processing of data from these multi-resolution instruments has generated long-term consistent data records spanning a period of nearly 32 years. These records contain daily surface reflectance, normalized from the Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) effects, as the fundamental CDR, and daily Normalized Differential Vegetation Index (NDVI) and LAI/FPAR as two thematic CDRs (TCDRs) derived from the fundamental CDR. The entire data record has recently been reprocessed with refined algorithms that incorporated the latest scientific findings from analysis of the earlier version of the data records. Since the inception of the project in 2004, these records have been reprocessed three times with introduction of the continuation records from MODIS in Version 3 (V3). The processing of the V4.2 has been released to the public in early summer 2014. This presentation describes the improvement to these records in V4.2 from better calibration to changes in the science algorithm generating the records. V4.2 will also include the proposed second TCDR i.e. the daily LAI/FPAR that wasn't generated in the earlier versions (to be released in early winter 2014). We will present a detailed analysis of the performance of those CDR (QA/Validation) as well as the transition from the MODIS/AVHRR CDR's to VIIRS.