GOES-R Land Surface Temperature

Team Members: Yunyue Yu, Peng Yu, Heshun Wang, and Yuling Liu

Background

The GOES-R series consists of four satellites. The first of the series, GOES-16, was launched on November 19th, 2016 and joined by GOES-17 and GOES-18 on March 1st, 2018 and March 1st, 2022. The former two replaced the previous GOES satellites as the new operational GOES-East and GOES-west, positioned at 75.2 W and 137.2 W, respectively. During the post-launch testing of the GOES-17 ABI, an issue with its cooling system was discovered, leading to partial loss of imagery during some of the overnight hours and significant degradation of the measurement quality. GOES-18 drifted to 137 W in June 2022. It replaced the GOES-17 and became operational GOES-west in January 2023.

The GOES-R ABI LST product is generated from ABI bands 14 (11.2 um) and 15 (12.3 um) with the split-window technique. The retrieval is available for each land/inland water pixel under clear, probably clear, or probably cloudy conditions. The LST product is currently being generated once an hour for every ABI Full Disk (FD) of the Earth, the Continental United States (CONUS) region, and the Mesoscale (MESO) regions. No MESO LST will be available under Scan Mode 4. The spatial resolutions are 2 km and 10 km for FD LST, and 2 km for the other coverages. A full description and format of the LST product can be found in GOES-R Product Definition and User's Guide (PUG). The algorithm used to derive the LST product from GOES-R ABI observations is described in detail in the GOES-R ABI Land Surface Temperature ATBD.

The GOES-16 and GOES-18 LST reached provisional maturity in September 2019 and November 2022, respectively. Their GOES-17 counterpart (during daytime when its ABI FPM temperature is relatively low) reached the same status in June 2019. To access the official ABI LST EDR, please visit CLASS.

More recently, an enterprise/mitigation LST algorithm has been developed to address the degraded sensor performance for GOES-17 ABI when its focal plane temperature is high. An updated retrieval algorithm during normal sensor conditions is also included. The package was installed in the GOES-R ground system on Aug. 19th, 2021 at around 17:55 UTC. The new ATBD documenting the present retrieval algorithm can be found here.

The algorithm has been tested with other satellites, e.g., Himawari-8 (and 9). To examine the testing results, please check out the Himawari-8 FLDK LST daily animation in near-real-time.

In another application, the algorithm was applied to five different gesostationary satellites, including GOES-16, GOES-17, Himawari-8, Meteosat-8, and Meteosat-11, which were then combined to a proto-type synchronized global LST.

We have tested and extended the LST algorithm with other sensors, including SLSTR from Sentinel-3A and Sentinel-3B, and AVHRR onboard NOAA-15, NOAA-18, NOAA-19, Metop-A, Metop-B, and Metop-C.