Expected performance of the Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) without detector sample aggregation

The potential for a significant improvement in the spatial resolution of the Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) is discussed. VIIRS continuously samples a 3000 km-wide swath from its low-earth orbit in support of NASA/NOAA’s weather, climate and environmental science missions. In order to provide superior spatial resolution across the swath compared with previous sensors, VIIRS samples the earth at very high angular resolutions and then aggregates up to three samples per pixel in order to reduce the raw data rate presented to the spacecraft for downlink. As additional downlink capacity becomes available, science data users may consider if utilization of the native rectangular resolution provided by the VIIRS detectors can improve any of the JPSS Environmental Data Records. The impacts to this potential improvement would be largely limited to increasing capacity for data handling and processing. The VIIRS sensor would still meet its sensitivity requirements in spite of this elimination of detector averaging.