An Introduction to the Geostationary-NASA Earth Exchange (GeoNEX) Products: 1. Top-of-Atmosphere Reflectance and Brightness Temperature Remote Sensing

GeoNEX is a collaborative project led by scientists from NASA, NOAA, and many other institutes around the world to generate Earth monitoring products using data streams from the latest Geostationary (GEO) sensors including the GOES-16/17 Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI), the Himawari-8/9 Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI), and more. An accurate and consistent product of the Top-Of-Atmosphere (TOA) reflectance and brightness temperature is the starting point in the scientific processing pipeline and has significant influences on the downstream products. This paper describes the main steps and the algorithms in generating the GeoNEX TOA products, starting from the conversion of digital numbers to physical quantities with the latest radiometric calibration information. We implement algorithms to detect and remove residual georegistration uncertainties automatically in both GOES and Himawari L1bdata, adjust the data for topographic relief, estimate the pixelwise data-acquisition time, and accurately calculate the solar illumination angles for each pixel in the domain at every time step. Finally, we reproject the TOA products to a globally tiled common grid in geographic coordinates in order to facilitate intercomparisons and/or synergies between the GeoNEX products and existing Earth observation datasets from polar-orbiting satellites.