The NOAA-20 Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Day/Night Band (DNB) Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) and Albedo (VJ143DNBA3) Version 2 product provides albedo values at 1 kilometer (km) resolution for the bihemispherical reflectance white-sky albedos (WSA) and directional hemispherical reflectance black-sky albedos (BSA) at local solar noon. The VJ143DNBA3 product is produced daily using 16 days of VIIRS data and is weighted temporally to the ninth day, which is reflected in the file name. The VJ143 data products are designed to promote the continuity of NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) BRDF/Albedo data product suite.

The VJ143 algorithm uses the RossThick/Li-Sparse-Reciprocal (RTLSR) semi-empirical kernel-driven BRDF model, with the three kernel weights from VJ143DNBA1 to reconstruct surface anisotropic effects, correcting the directional reflectance to a common view geometry (VJ143DNBA4), while also computing integrated black-sky albedo (BSA) at local solar noon and white-sky albedo (WSA) (VJ143DNBA3). Researchers can use the BRDF model parameters with a simple polynomial to obtain black-sky albedo at any solar illumination angle. Likewise, both the BSA and WSA Science Dataset (SDS) layers can be used with a simple polynomial to manually estimate instantaneous actual albedo (blue-sky albedo). Additional details regarding the methodology are available in the Algorithm Theoretical Basis Document (ATBD).

The VJ143DNBA3 product provides BSA, WSA, and mandatory quality layers for the VIIRS DNB. A low-resolution image is also available showing retrievals of WSA for the shortwave broadband in JPEG format.

Known Issues

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