Evaluation of Long-Term Calibrations of the AVHRR Visible Radiances

Two systematic calibrations have been compiled for the visible radiances measured by the series of AVHRR instruments flown on the NOAA operational polar weather satellites: one by the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP), anchored on NASA ER-2 underflights in the 1980s and early 1990s and covering the period 1981-2009, and one by the PATMOS-x project, anchored on comparisons to the MODIS instruments on the Aqua and Terra satellites in the 2000s and covering the period 1979-2010 (this result also includes calibration for the near-IR channels). Both methods have had to extend their anchor calibrations over a long series of instruments using different vicarious approaches, so a comparison provides an opportunity to evaluate how well this extension works by cross-checking the results at the anchor points. The basic result of this comparison is that for the ''afternoon'' series of AVHRRs, the calibrations agree to within their mutual uncertainties. However, this retrospective evaluation also shows that the representation of the time variations can be simplified. The ISCCP procedure had much more difficulty extending the calibration to the ''morning'' series of AVHRRs with the calibrations for NOAA-15 and NOAA-17 exceeding the estimated uncertainties. Given the general agreement, a new calibration for all AVHRR visible radiances (except TIROS-N, NOAA-6, NOAA-19, and MetOp-A) is proposed that is based on the average of the best linear fits to the two time records. The estimated uncertainty of these calibrations is 63% absolute (scaled radiance units)