The NOAA-20 Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Water Reservoir 8-day Level 3 (L3) Global (VJ128C2) Version 2 product provides current data for 151 man-made reservoirs and 13 regulated natural lakes for a total of 164 reservoirs.

The VJ128C2 data product provides an 8-day time series of surface area, elevation, and water storage. Datasets are combined with pre-established Area-Elevation (A-E) curves and image classifications of near-infrared (NIR) reflectance from the surface reflectance product acquired by the VIIRS satellite (VJ109H1).

The VJ128C2 data product consists of a single layer with information about the reservoir identifier, dam location (longitude and latitude), reservoir surface area, elevation, and water storage capacity.

Known Issues

• Water occurrence images generally show smaller surface area dynamics in high latitude regions, creating pixels with low occurrence values that have relatively large uncertainties. In addition, the quality of raw water area classification can be affected by lake ice coverage typically creating an overestimation of surface area in the enhancement algorithm. This issue will be addressed in a future release of the enhancement algorithm. For additional information about known issues, refer to Section 4 in the User Guide.