NOAA GOES-R Series Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) Level 1b Radiances

The data are available from NOAA-NCEI

The convert_goes_ABI_L1b program converts ABI Level 1b Radiances in netCDF format to a DART observation sequence file with GOES_16_ABI_RADIANCE observations (there is a namelist option to select other GOES satellites, which will have the appropriate observation type).

The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) instrument samples the radiance of the Earth in sixteen spectral bands using several arrays of detectors in the instrument’s focal plane. Single reflective band ABI Level 1b Radiance Products (channels 1 - 6 with approximate center wavelengths 0.47, 0.64, 0.865, 1.378, 1.61, 2.25 microns, respectively) are digital maps of outgoing radiance values at the top of the atmosphere for visible and near-infrared (IR) bands. Single emissive band ABI L1b Radiance Products (channels 7 - 16 with approximate center wavelengths 3.9, 6.185, 6.95, 7.34, 8.5, 9.61, 10.35, 11.2, 12.3, 13.3 microns, respectively) are digital maps of outgoing radiance values at the top of the atmosphere for IR bands. Detector samples are compressed, packetized and down-linked to the ground station as Level 0 data for conversion to calibrated, geo-located pixels (Level 1b Radiance data). The detector samples are decompressed, radiometrically corrected, navigated and resampled onto an invariant output grid, referred to as the ABI fixed grid.

Cite as: GOES-R Calibration Working Group and GOES-R Series Program, (2017): NOAA GOES-R Series Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) Level 1b Radiances. [indicate subset used]. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. doi:10.7289/V5BV7DSR. [access date].

Specifying a vertical location

Jeff Steward added (PR 48) the capability to specify a vertical location if desired. This allows for localization in the vertical.

It’s sometimes helpful, even though definitely wrong from a theoretical standpoint, to give a vertical location to satellite observations (which are integrated quantities). This has been an issue with observation-space localization for some time, and this is the standard workaround pioneered by Lili Lei and Jeff Whittaker.

A short description of the namelist options

This table is meant to familiarize you with some of the options available. Until we fully implement automatic documentation generation, you would be well advised to familiarize yourself with the code. This is not the full list of namelist variables …

variable	default	meaning
x_thin	0	Skip this many per X scan.
y_thin	0	Skip this many per Y scan.
goes_num	16	GOES Satellite number.
reject_dqf_1	.true.	Bad scan rejection criteria. If .true. and DQF /= 0, the scan is rejected. If .false. any DQF > 1 rejects the scan.
verbose	.false.	Run-time output verbosity
obs_err	MISSING_R8	The observation error standard deviation (std dev, in radiance units) TODO: make this more sophisticated. You must supply a value other than MISSING_R8. Be aware that the observation sequence files convert this to a variance.
vloc_pres_hPa	-1.0	The vertical location of this observation (hPa). A negative means there is no vertical location (which is typical for a ve rtically-integrated quantity).