Intercomparison of the GOES-16 and-17 Advanced Baseline Imager with low Earth orbit sensors

The GOES-16 satellite was launched on 19 Nov 2016, and it became operational as the GOES-East satellite on 18 Dec 2017. The GOES-17 satellite was launched on 1 Mar 2018, and it became the GOES-West operational satellite on 12 Feb 2019. The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) is one of six instruments onboard GOES-16 and -17. ABI has 16 spectral bands, a spatial resolution of 0.5 km to 2.0 km, and five times the temporal coverage of the previous GOES Imager series of sensors. The Radiometric Calibration Test Site (RadCaTS) is an automated facility at Railroad Valley, Nevada, USA, which contains ground based instruments that measure the surface reflectance and atmosphere throughout the day. It was developed by the Remote Sensing Group (RSG) of the James C. Wyant College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona, and it is currently used to monitor such low Earth orbit (LEO) sensors as Landsat-7 ETM+, Landsat-8 OLI, Terra and Aqua MODIS, Sentinel-2A and -2B MSI, Sentinel-3A and -3B OLCI and SLSTR, and others. The improved spectral, spatial, and temporal characteristics of ABI create an excellent opportunity to intercompare results obtained from a geosynchronous sensor to those obtained from typical LEO sensors. This work describes current efforts to validate the radiometric calibration of ABI as well as perform an intercomparison with various LEO sensors.