Assessing the Effects of Suomi NPP VIIRS M15/M16 Detector Radiometric Stability and Relative Spectral Response Variation on Striping

Modern satellite radiometers have many detectors with different relative spectral response (RSR). Effect of RSR differences on striping and the root cause of striping in sensor data record (SDR) radiance and brightness temperature products have not been well studied. A previous study used MODTRAN radiative transfer model (RTM) to analyze striping. In this study, we make efforts to find the possible root causes of striping. Line-by-Line RTM (LBLRTM) is used to evaluate the effect of RSR difference on striping and the atmospheric dependency for VIIRS bands M15 and M16. The results show that previous study using MODTRAN is repeatable: the striping is related to the difference between band-averaged and detector-level RSR, and the BT difference has some atmospheric dependency. We also analyzed VIIRS earth view (EV) data with several striping index methods. Since the EV data is complex, we further analyze the onboard calibration data. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) test shows that the noise along track direction is the major reason for striping. We also found evidence of correlation between solar diffuser (SD) and blackbody (BB) for detector 1 in M15. Digital Count Restoration (DCR) and detector instability are possibly related to the striping in SD and EV data, but further analysis is needed. These findings can potentially lead to further SDR processing improvements.