Enhanced image products by limb-correction and smoothing of VAS radiance measurements
Limb darkening and brightening affect the GOES satellite's VISSR Atmospheric Sounder instrument's imagery with varying satellite viewing angles and instrument noise; limb effects are also associated with a vertical shift of a wavelength's characteristic weighting function. The radiances in an image can be normalized to a reference zenith angle by limb-correcting the image. An additional undesirable effect is that of instrument noise, which varies as a function of channel characteristics and is greatest for channels sensitive to the upper atmosphere. The statistical structure function analysis method of Hillger et al. (1987) is used to obtain noise levels and optimal spatial averaging distances; the averaging domain size from the analysis is used to produce smoothed images, via a running average technique.