An Update on NOAA's JPSS Land Products and Their Incorporation into Operational Applications

NOAA’s Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) program supports the development of multiple land surface products to support critical operational applications. A suite of products is derived from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) and the operational JPSS satellite series. In addition to the six fundamental heritage products – surface reflectance, vegetation indices, surface albedo, land surface temperature, active fires and surface type - multiple additional added-value environmental data records (EDRs) and also generated. The recent focus has been the conversion of most land data products, originally generated for each VIIRS granule, to global, gridded composites at various temporal scales. This improvement facilitates the integration of these data products into NOAA’s operational land surface and coupled numerical weather prediction modeling suite. The first VIIRS land product tested for operational integration is near-real-time Green Vegetation Fraction, where recent improvements include algorithm adjustments to best represent the phonological cycle of vegetation. Land surface temperature, albedo and surface type under testing and evaluation. The NOAA JPSS Land Team is also working on vegetation health, phenology, near-real-time surface type and surface condition change, and other biogeophysical variables to better serve end users’ data needs to support operational applications in environmental monitoring, prediction, disaster management and mitigation, and decision support.