UMass Boston

VIIRS User Guide Collection 1

This Guide is a living document that describes the VIIRS BRDF and Albedo Products. The purpose of the document is to give the potential user an understanding of the VNP43 products and the current state of the data in those products.

Note: Users are urged to use the band specific quality flags to isolate the highest quality full inversion results for their own science applications. 

The VNP43C3 Climate Modeling Grid (CMG) at 0.05 degree spatial resolution provides both the white-sky albedos and the black-sky albedos (at local solar noon) for the VIIRS spectral M bands (M1–M5, M7–M8 and M10–M11), the three broad bands (0.3-0.7µm, 0.7-5.0µm, and 0.3-5.0µm), and the Day Night Band (DNB) at a 0.05 degree spatial resolution in global files in a geographic (lat/long) projection. These albedo values are calculated from the BRDF model parameters provided in VNP43C1. Note that along coastlines, this means that the 30arcsecond pixels that lie over shallow water will be averaged into the 0.05 degree CMG pixel. In addition to the spectral and broadband albedo quantities themselves, the VNP43C3 CMG Albedo Product also provides mandatory quality information. The quality and inversion status of the majority of the underlying 30arc pixels is provided as well as the percentage of the underlying pixels that were present or were snow covered. Therefore, the quality should be considered with caution for quantitative applications.