The NOAA-20 Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Land Surface Temperature and Emissivity (LST&E) Day Version 2 product (VJ121A1D) is compiled daily from daytime Level 2 Gridded (L2G) intermediate products.

The L2G process maps the daily VJ121 swath granules onto a sinusoidal MODIS grid and stores all observations overlapping a gridded cell for a given day. The VJ121A1 algorithm sorts through all these observations for each cell and estimates the final LST value as an average from all cloud-free observations that have good LST accuracies. The daytime average is weighted by the observation coverage for that cell. Only observations having observation coverage more than a certain threshold (15%) are considered for this averaging. The 1 kilometer dataset is derived through resampling the native 750 meter VIIRS resolution in the input product.

The VJ121A1D product is developed synergistically with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) LST&E Version 6.1 product (MOD21A1D) using the same input atmospheric products and algorithmic approach. The overall objective for NASA VIIRS products is to ensure the algorithms and products are compatible with the MODIS Terra and Aqua algorithms to promote the continuity of the Earth Observation System (EOS) mission. Additional details regarding the method used to create this Level 3 (L3) product are available in the Algorithm Theoretical Basis Document (ATBD).

The VJ121A1D product contains seven Science Datasets (SDS): LST, quality control, emissivity for bands M14, M15, and M16, view zenith angle, and time of observation. A low-resolution browse image for LST is also available for each VJ121A1D granule.

Known Issues

• For complete information about known issues please refer to the MODIS/VIIRS Land Quality Assessment website and the User Guide.

Improvements/Changes from Previous Version

• Improved calibration algorithm and coefficients for entire NOAA-20 mission.
• Improved geolocation accuracy and applied updates to fix outliers around maneuver periods.
• Corrected the aerosol quantity flag (low, average, high) mainly over brighter surfaces in the mid- to high-latitudes such as desert and tropical vegetation areas. This has an impact on the retrieval of other downstream data products such as VNP13 Vegetation Indices and VNP43 Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF)/Albedo.
• Improved cloud mask input product for corrections along coastlines and artifacts from use of coarse resolution climatology data.
• Replaced the land/water mask input product with the eight-class land/water mask from the VNP03 geolocation product that better aligns with MODIS.
• Replaced MERRA2 inputs with GEOS5.
• Included inland water body pixels to allow for LST retrieval over these areas.
• Introduced daily, 8-day, and monthly LST CMG products.
• More details can be found in this VIIRS Land V2 Changes document.