NPP Launch

Friday, 25 November, 2011

NPP launched a few weeks back and has just sent back its first imagery. Jonathon Amos (over at the BBC) has an interesting article discussing the importance of weather satellites to remote sensing and society more widely. NPP is designed to fit the gap in polar orbiting meteorological data collection, although with a remit for land data collection (but bear in mind its a research satellite and designed as a pre-cursor for the future operational-grade JPSS).

Land data collection has been been achieved in the past with AVHRR, SeaWiFS and (more recently) MODIS. These have increasingly become super-spectral sensors with wide swaths and functional spatial resolutions. NPP is a 5-instrument mission, but the biggest and most important is VIIRS. This has 22-bands in visible and near/mid/far infra-red, 3000 km swath and something approaching 650 m spatial resolution. Radiometric resolution with be 12-14-bit. Anyway, it’ll be very interesting to see how data delivery and use goes.