NOAA20 and S-NPP VIIRS Land Surface Temperature Product Validation and Inter-Comparison

The enterprise Land Surface Temperature (LST) algorithm has been operationally implemented for Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) onboard both NOAA 20 (N20) and Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) satellite since September, 2019. This study presents the validation of the two LST products. The ground based measurements from Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN) and Surface Radiation Budget Network (SURFRAD) were used to estimate the quantitative uncertainty of the LST product. The validation results present a similarly close agreement between ground observations and satellite estimations from both N20 and S-NPP VIIRS LST products. The accuracy is about -0.4 K for N20 and -0.3 K for S-NPP and the precision is about 1.9 K for both LST products over SURFRAD sites. Similar performance is achieved over BSRN sites. In addition, the global inter-comparison of the two LST products were presented and analyzed.