Development and enhancement of calibration/validation toolkit for supporting NPOESS/NPP missions

Calibration and validation (Cal/Val) toolkits are very critical for both satellite pre-launch end-to-end testing and post-launch real data quality check-out. In this paper, we present a AIRS-MODIS-VIIRS band mapping toolkit, which is designed for cross comparison and cross calibration of AIRS-MODIS-VIIRS thermal infrared bands based on the band-mapping approach we proposed. The main functionalities of this toolkit include spatial match-up between AIRS and MODIS foot prints, spectral simulation of VIIRS and MODIS thermal infrared bands with AIRS measurements, visual and statistical analyses among VIIRS, MODIS and AIRS thermal infrared bands for stratified scene characteristics, channels and scan angles. It also provides basic data manipulation and file format conversion capabilities. This toolkit can provide supports for VIIRS calibration and can be further enhanced into a NPOESS/NPP post-launch toolkit for real-time cross-instrument calibration and data quality check.