Reviews and syntheses: Ongoing and emerging opportunities to improve environmental science using observations from the Advanced Baseline Imager on the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites

Authors: KHAN, A. - University Of Wisconsin; STOY, P. - University Of Wisconsin; DOUGLAS, J. - Montana State University; Anderson, Martha; DIAK, G. - University Of Wisconsin; OTKIN, J. - University Of Wisconsin; HAIN, C. - Nasa Marshall Space Flight Center; REHBEIN, E. - Montana State University; MCCORKEL, J. - National Aeronautics And Space Administration (NASA)

Submitted to: Biogeosciences
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 6/6/2021
Publication Date: 7/12/2021
Citation: Khan, A., Stoy, P., Douglas, J., Anderson, M.C., Diak, G., Otkin, J., Hain, C., Rehbein, E., Mccorkel, J. 2021. Reviews and syntheses: Ongoing and emerging opportunities to improve environmental science using observations from the Advanced Baseline Imager on the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites. Biogeosciences. 18(13):4117–4141. https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-18-4117-2021.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-18-4117-2021

Interpretive Summary: Data from geostationary satellites, such as the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES), have long been a staple in weather forecasting and storm tracking, providing rapid imagery (every 5-15 minutes) over continental scales. These satellites are less widely used in environmental and agricultural monitoring, although many applications could significantly benefit from the time-continuous imaging they provide. This paper describes a wide range of existing and emerging applications for high temporal resolution geostationary satellite imaging in ecosystem science, including mapping of solar radiation, vegetation greenness and moisture, carbon fluxes, evapotranspiration, drought, plant phenology, and wildfire detection and emission tracking. In addition, geostationary imagery provides a useful temporal platform for fusing with higher resolution periodic imagery from polar orbiting satellites, opening the door to fused products with both high spatial and temporal resolution. Leveraging the high-frequency observations from geostationary sensors for investigations in environmental science, where to date they have been largely untapped, will expand our ability to track rapid changes in land-surface conditions and facilitate data-driven response and decision making.

Technical Abstract: Environmental science is increasingly reliant on remotely-sensed observations of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere. Observations from polar-orbiting satellites have long supported investigations on land cover change, ecosystem productivity, hydrology, climate, the impacts of disturbance, and more, and are critical for extrapolating (“upscaling”) ground-based measurements to larger areas. However, the limited temporal frequency at which polar-orbiting satellites observe the Earth limits our understanding of rapidly evolving ecosystem processes, especially in areas with frequent cloud cover. Geostationary satellites have observed the Earth’s surface and atmosphere at high temporal frequency for decades, and their imagers now have spectral resolutions in the visible and near-infrared regions that are comparable to commonly-used polar-orbiting sensors like the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), or Landsat. These advances extend applications of geostationary Earth observations from weather monitoring to multiple disciplines in ecology and environmental science. We review a number of existing applications that use data from geostationary platforms and present upcoming opportunities for observing key ecosystem properties using high-frequency observations from the Advanced Baseline Imagers (ABI) on the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES), which routinely observe the Western Hemisphere every 5 - 15 minutes. Many of the existing applications in environmental science from ABI are focused on estimating land surface temperature, solar radiation, evapotranspiration, and biomass burning emissions along with detecting rapid drought development and wildfire. Ongoing work in estimating vegetation properties and phenology from other geostationary platforms demonstrates the potential for expanding ABI observations to estimate vegetation greenness, moisture, and productivity at high temporal frequency across the Western Hemisphere. Finally, we present emerging opportunities to address the relatively coarse resolution of ABI observations through multi-sensor fusion to resolve landscape heterogeneity and to leverage observations from ABI to study the carbon cycle and ecosystem function at unprecedented temporal frequency