VNP43IA3: Daily Surface Albedo at 500m Resolution

NASA/NOAA's Suomi NPP VIIRS satellite provides daily 500-meter resolution maps of Earth's surface albedo, a measure of solar reflectivity critical for climate models. The VNP43IA3 product uses 16 days of data weighted to the ninth day and the RossThick/Li-Sparse-Reciprocal BRDF model to generate black-sky and white-sky albedo values. This dataset is designed to ensure continuity with NASA's legacy MODIS BRDF/Albedo product suite.

Use Cases

• Modeling surface energy balance based on black-sky albedo (BSA) and white-sky albedo (WSA) Science Dataset layers.
• Estimating instantaneous 'blue-sky' albedo by applying a polynomial to the provided BSA and WSA layers.
• Analyzing land surface anisotropy and directional reflectance using the derived BRDF model parameters.
• Continuity studies comparing VIIRS albedo data with historical MODIS BRDF/Albedo products.

Strengths

• Provides high-resolution (500m) daily global coverage of a key climate variable.
• Uses a sophisticated, documented (ATBD) RTLSR kernel-driven BRDF model for accurate reflectance correction.
• Contains 9 Science Dataset layers, including albedo values and mandatory quality flags for three VIIRS bands.

Limitations

• Metadata completeness is low: column names, row counts, and exact data size are unknown across all platforms.
• Contains a known issue where abnormally high activation of a high aerosol flag in an upstream product impacts data quality.
• Last update dates conflict between sources (2025-02 08 vs. 2026-04-09), creating uncertainty about freshness.

Provenance

Source

NASA/NOAA Suomi NPP VIIRS satellite, processed by LPCLOUD.

Collection Method

Produced daily using 16 days of VIIRS sensor data, temporally weighted to the ninth day.

Time Range

Daily production suggests a continuous time series, but specific start date is not provided.

Freshness

2026-04-09 20:58:29.581385

Geography

Global coverage at 500m resolution on the SIN grid.