VNP43IA3N: Daily Global Land Surface Albedo at 500m

VIIRS/NPP Albedo Daily L3 Global 500 m SIN Grid NRT (VNP43IA3N) provides daily surface albedo values at a 500-meter resolution. It uses a 16-day rolling window of VIIRS data and the RossThick/Li-Sparse-Reciprocal BRDF model to generate black-sky and white-sky albedo layers. The product includes 9 Science Dataset layers for albedo and quality assessment across VIIRS imagery bands I1, I2, and I3.

Use Cases

• Modeling surface energy balance based on black-sky albedo (BSA) and white-sky albedo (WSA) layers.
• Estimating instantaneous blue-sky albedo using the provided polynomial method with BSA and WSA layers.
• Analyzing land surface anisotropy and directional reflectance effects using the derived BRDF model parameters.
• Monitoring daily changes in surface radiative properties for climate studies, leveraging the 500m spatial resolution.

Strengths

• Provides daily, near-real-time (NRT) global coverage, as indicated by the product title and description.
• Offers a high spatial resolution of 500 meters for detailed land surface analysis.
• Derives albedo using a sophisticated, documented methodology (RTLSR BRDF model) based on a 16-day data composite.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as row count, file size, and specific license terms are missing or conflicting across platforms (listed as 'other-license-specified' or 'None').
• The exact temporal coverage of the dataset is not specified, only the production frequency.
• Relies on inferred data types (geospatial, time-series) from descriptions, as explicit column names are unavailable.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Satellite remote sensing data from the VIIRS/NPP sensor, processed using the VNP43 algorithm.

Freshness

2026-04-09 21:00:03.034864

Geography

Global