Green Band Generation for Advanced Baseline Imager Sensor Using Pix2Pix With Advanced Baseline Imager and Advanced Himawari Imager Observations

Green bands in satellite remote sensing play an important role in monitoring water and vegetation information. Due to the lack of observed green band, the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-16) Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) sensor uses a synthetic one. This study presents an ABI green band generation method using the Pix2Pix based on conditional generative adversarial networks (CGANs) and convolutional neural network techniques with data observed in the visible range of the GOES-16/ABI sensor. Our model was constructed from the radiance data sets in the red, blue, and green bands of the Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI) onboard Himawari-8/9 satellites from August 27, 2018 to May 1, 2019, and applied to generate a GOES-16 ABI green band using the ABI blue band radiance data. A comparison between the AHI and the Pix2Pix-generated AHI green bands displayed high accuracy, evaluated through bias = 0.120, root mean square error (RMSE) = 0.983 in digital number (DN) units, and correlation coefficient (CC) = 0.999. Furthermore, comparison between the Pix2Pix-generated and synthetic ABI green bands resulted in a good agreement (bias = 1.029 and RMSE = 2.892 in DN units, CC = 0.993). The statistical comparison between the green band, and red or blue band resulted in the exceptional performance of the Pix2Pix-generated ABI green band compared to the synthetic ABI green band. Consequently, our Pix2Pix-based model can be effectively used to generate nonexistent green band of ABI sensor and be applied in a variety of scientific applications requiring green band.