VJ121C1 v002

• 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.

Validation at stage 1 has been achieved for the VIIRS Land Surface Temperature and Emissivity product suite. Visit VIIRS Land Product Quality Assessment Product Maturity for information on product maturity status.

The final quality bit for the output product reflects the lowest quality values from all observations that went into the final average. The bit flags for the QC layer are defined in Table 9 of the User Guide.

The quality layer is stored in an efficient bit-encoded manner. The unpack_sds_bits executable from the LDOPE Tools is available to the user community to help parse and interpret the quality layer.

Quality assurance information should be considered when determining the usability of data for a particular science application. The ArcGIS MODIS-VIIRS Python Toolbox contains tools capable of decoding quality data layers while producing thematic quality raster files for each quality attribute.

For additional information on product quality, refer to the VIIRS Land Product Quality website.

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