A proposal for maintaining the current s-NPP and NOAA-20 fusion radiance products to provide continuity with aqua modis measurements

As background for the viirs+cris fusion radiance product modis has three bands sensitive to CO2 around 4.3 m and another four around 15 m two bands sensitive to H2O near 6.7 m and a band sensitive to ozone near 9.6 m. Viirs has none of these IR bands affected by atmospheric absorption which results in a degradation of the accuracy of several products including those associated with clouds (cloud mask cloud top pressure/height and thermodynamic phase) and atmospheric water vapor (total precipitable water vapor upper tropospheric humidity). The fusion radiance product provides an innovative solution to this problem: the team developed a way to construct high spatial resolution spectral bands for viirs based on a data fusion method and now provide through the atmosphere sips a product called fsnad that contains twelve additional radiances at 750M spatial resolution for the CO2 (modis bands 24 25 and 33-36) the O3 (modis band 30) and the H2O (modis bands 27 and 28) spectrally sensitive regions. Our production software for deriving the fusion radiances for both s-NPP and NOAA-20 is mature and fully integrated in the atmosphere sips (or a-sips) operations. While the full record of the NOAA-20 fusion radiance subsetted product was a primary task for the previous proposal this time this proposal aims to provide the full record of s-NPP data fusion radiance subsetted product as well. The team proposes to create a full and continuing record of the subsetted s-NPP fusion radiance product by filling the GAP due to the anomaly in the snpp/cris LW and MW range of data by using the temporal fusion method on the snpp/viirs and NOAA-20 cris+viirs fusion radiances. The subsetted data files requested by the ceres team include 5 of the 12 bands (bands 27 33 through 36) and are spatially subsampled for every other pixel in a row and column.