VNP21A1N v001

The NASA Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Land Surface Temperature and Emissivity (LST&E) Night Version 1 product (VNP21A1N) is compiled daily from nighttime Level 2 Gridded (L2G) intermediate products.

The L2G process maps the daily VNP21 swath granules onto a sinusoidal MODIS grid and stores all observations overlapping a gridded cell for a given night. The VNP21A1 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 nighttime 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 VNP21A1N product is developed synergistically with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) LST&E Version 6 product (MOD21A1N) 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). VIIRS LST&E products are available 2 months after acquisition due to latency of data inputs.

The VNP21A1N 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 VNP21A1N granule.