VIIRS/NPP Land Surface BRF: Daily Global Surface Reflectance at 375m and 750m

NASA/NOAA Suomi NPP VIIRS Land Surface Bidirectional Reflectance Factor (BRF) data produced daily at 375 meter and 750 meter pixel resolution using a Rotated Sinusoidal projection. The VNP19A1 Version 2 product is corrected for atmospheric gases and aerosols using the Multi-Angle Implementation of Atmospheric Correction (MAIAC) algorithm. It provides surface spectral reflectance estimates as measured at ground-level, along with layers for observation geometry and RTLS model kernels.

Use Cases

• Monitoring land surface change over time based on daily surface reflectance layers.
• Validating atmospheric correction algorithms based on the MAIAC-processed BRF data.
• Modeling surface reflectance anisotropy based on the provided Ross-Thick Li-Sparse (RTLS) kernels.
• Analyzing coastal and high-latitude regions with awareness of the documented artifact cautions.

Strengths

• Data is produced daily, enabling high-temporal-resolution analysis.
• Atmospheric correction is applied using the MAIAC algorithm, which performs time series analysis.
• Provides surface reflectance at two spatial resolutions: 375 meters and 750 meters.
• Includes ancillary data layers such as solar/view angles and scattering angles.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Known issues include reduced accuracy at solar zenith angles > 78° and potential artifacts near coastlines.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.

Provenance

Source

NASA/NOAA Suomi NPP satellite, processed by LPCLOUD.

Collection Method

Satellite imagery processed with the MAIAC atmospheric correction algorithm.

Time Range

Daily coverage.

Freshness

Daily production frequency.

Geography

Global coverage.