Validation of Himawari-8/AHI Radiometric Calibration Based on Two Years of In-Orbit Data

The new geostationary (GEO) meteorological satellite of the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), Himawari-8, entered operation on 7 July 2015. Himawari-8 features the new 16-band Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI), whose spatial resolution and observation frequency are improved over those of its predecessor MTSAT-series satellites. These improvements will bring about unprecedented levels of performance in nowcasting services and short-range weather forecasting systems. In view of the essential nature of navigation and radiometric calibration in fully leveraging the imager’s potential, this study reports on the current status of calibration for the AHI. Image navigation is accurate to within 1 km, and band-to-band coregistration has also been validated. Infrared (IR) band calibration is accurate to within 0.2 K with no significant diurnal variation and is being validated using an approach developed under the Global Space-based Inter-Calibration System (GSICS) framework. Validation approaches are currently being tested for the visible and near-IR (NIR) bands. Two such approaches were compared and found to produce largely consistent results.