Multisite Calibration Tracking for FY-3A MERSI Solar Bands

The MEdium Resolution Spectral Imager (MERSI), onboard the second generation Chinese polar-orbit meteorological satellite FY-3A, is a MODIS-like sensor with 19 solar bands and one thermal infrared band. Although there is a visible on-board calibration device, it can only be used for tracking temporal instrument degradation. The vicarious calibration (VC) campaign at the Dunhuang site, conducted once a year, has been the main post-launch absolute radiometric calibration method for MERSI in the solar bands. To increase the in-flight calibration frequency, a multi-site radiometric calibration tracking method is presented. This method relies on simulated radiation over several stable sites, and a daily calibration updating model is built from longterm trending of calibration coefficient series. The MERSI calibration reference is evaluated against the observations of Aqua MODIS, showing mean relative biases within 5% from 0.4 to 2.1 μm. The shortwave channels of MERSI are found to experience large degradation, especially the 412 nm band with an annual degradation rate of 9.7%, while the red and near-infrared bands are relatively stable with annual degradation rates within ±1%. Several approaches have been used to analyze the reliability of MERSI calibration results. A comparison of the calibration slopes shows that the relative biases between the multi-site method and the annual Dunhuang VC campaign are below 3.8%. Aqua MODIS is used as a reference to monitor the data quality of the recalibrated MERSI. A double difference analysis shows that the mean relative biases are almost within 5% over stable deserts, and the synchronous nadir observation analysis also reveals good agreement.