| Abstract: |
NOAA-20 (hereafter, N20; also known as JPSS-1 or J1 prior to launch) is the second satellite in the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) latest generation Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS). N20 was launched on November 18, 2017. In conjunction with the first US satellite in JPSS series, Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) satellite launched on October 28, 2011, N20 form the new NOAA polar constellation. The ACSPO N20/VIIRS L3U (Level 3 Uncollated) product is a gridded version of the ACSPO N20/VIIRS L2P product. The L3U output files are 10-minute granules in netCDF4 format, compliant with the GHRSST Data Specification version 2 (GDS2). There are 144 granules per 24hr interval, with a total data volume of 500MB/day. Fill values are reported at all invalid pixels, including pixels with >5 km inland. For each valid water pixel (defined as ocean, sea, lake or river, and up to 5 km inland), the following layers are reported: SSTs, ACSPO clear-sky mask (ACSM; provided in each grid as part of l2p_flags, which also includes day/night, land, ice, twilight, and glint flags), NCEP wind speed, and ACSPO SST minus reference (Canadian Met Centre 0.1deg L4 SST). Only L2P SSTs with QL=5 were gridded, so all valid SSTs are recommended for the users. Per GDS2 specifications, two additional Sensor-Specific Error Statistics layers (SSES bias and standard deviation) are reported in each pixel with valid SST. The ACSPO VIIRS L3U product is monitored and validated against iQuam in situ data (Xu and Ignatov, 2014) in SQUAM (Dash et al, 2010). |