Inter-sensor LSA Comparison: GOES-18 vs. GOES-17

Note: some GOES-17 results may be degraded due to overheating of its ABI sensor.

GOES-18 completed its westward drifting and stayed at 136.8º W on June 7th, 2022. Its view geometry at the new location is very similar to that of the GOES-17 (located at 137.2º W). Products from both platforms are operationally projected to the same GOES-WEST localtion at 137º W, and thus share the same coordinate system. The following shows a direct comparison of their surface albedo products for the most recent week including both CONUS and Full Disk coverages.

Three indices are provided:

• Mean difference: the average of LSA difference over all matchups with valid retrievals to show the bias between two products;
• Standard deviation: the standard deviation of LSA difference over all matchups with valid retrievals to show the scattering of the difference;
• Count: the number of matchups used in the statistics.

Note: Albedo is a day time product available under SZA<70°, so the matchup number would decrease at early or late hours in local time with the increasing SZA. Moreover, the difference in the albedo results could be larger in these hours due to the inherent larger uncertainty in the surface reflectance and limited angle distribution in BRDF retrieval under larger SZA conditions.