Evapotranspiration data product from NESDIS GET-D system upgraded for GOES-16 ABI observations

Authors: FANG, L. - University Of Maryland; ZHANG, X. - National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); SCHULL, M.A. - University Of Maryland; KULLURI, S. - National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); LASZLO, I. - National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); YU, P. - University Of Maryland; CARTER, C. - University Of Maryland; HAIN, C. - Nasa Marshall Space Flight Center; Anderson, Martha

Submitted to: Remote Sensing
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 2/9/2020
Publication Date: 2/25/2020
Citation: Fang, L., Zhang, X., Schull, M., Kulluri, S., Laszlo, I., Yu, P., Carter, C., Hain, C., Anderson, M.C. 2020. Evapotranspiration data product from NESDIS GET-D system upgraded for GOES-16 ABI observations. Remote Sensing. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11222639.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11222639

Interpretive Summary: A satellite remote sensing-based model of evapotranspiration (ET), using thermal infrared imagery from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES), developed by USDA researchers, was implemented operationally in 2016 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in support of weather forecast model validation and drought monitoring. The original implementation within the GOES ET and Drought (GET-D) product system was at 8-km spatial resolution covering North America. Since then, newer generation GOES satellites (GOES-R) have been deployed by NOAA, with improved radiometry, spatial resolution, and temporal frequency of image collection. This paper describes the transition of the GET-D system to the new GOES-R data inputs, resulting in 2-km daily ET estimates. Output from the new and old systems is compared, demonstrating similar performance but significantly better spatial detail from the new system. These new datasets will provide valuable real-time consumptive water use estimates for agricultural water management and for monitoring water stress over croplands and rangelands.

Technical Abstract: Evapotranspiration (ET) is a major component of the global and regional water cycle. An operational GOES ET and Drought (GET-D) product system has been developed by the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS) in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for numerical weather prediction model validation, data assimilation and drought monitoring. GET-D system was generating ET and Evaporative Stress Index maps at 8km spatial resolution using thermal observations of the Imagers on GOES-13 and GOES-15 before the primary operational GOES satellites transitioned to GOES-16 and GOES-17 with the Advanced Baseline Imagers (ABI). In this study, the GET-D product system is upgraded to ingest the thermal observations of ABI with the best spatial resolution of 2km. The core of the GET-D system is the Atmosphere-Land Exchange Inversion (ALEXI) model, which exploits the mid-morning rise in the land surface temperature to deduce the land surface fluxes including ET. Satellite-based land surface temperature and solar insolation retrievals from ABI and meteorological forcing from NOAA NCEP Climate Forecast System (CFS) are the major inputs to the GET-D system. Ancillary data required in GET-D include land cover map, leaf area index, albedo and cloud mask. This paper presents preliminary results of ET from the upgraded GET-D system after a brief introduction of the ALEXI model and the architecture of GET-D system. Comparisons with in situ ET measurements showed that the accuracy of the GOES-16 ABI based ET is similar to the results from the legacy GET-D ET based on GOES-13/15 Imager data. The agreement with the in situ measurements is satisfactory with a correlation of 0.914 averaged from three Mead sites. Further evaluation of the ABI-based ET product, upgrade efforts of the GET-D system for ESI product, and conclusions for the ABI-based GET-D products are discussed.