The VJ219A2 Version 2 data product is a NOAA-21 Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Land Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) gridded Level 2 product produced daily at 750 meter (m) pixel resolution using the Rotated Sinusoidal (RSIN) projection. The VJ219A2 product provides the atmospheric properties and view geometry used to calculate the Multi-Angle Implementation of Atmospheric Correction (MAIAC) Land Surface Bidirectional Reflectance Factor (BRF) or surface reflectance, VJ219A1 product.
Provided in the VJ219A2 product are layers for AOD, AOD uncertainty and QA, injection height of smoke plume, AOD outside of glint area, fine mode fraction, and cosines of solar and view zenith angles, relative azimuth, scattering angle, glint angle, and Angstrom Exponent over the ocean.
Known Issues
- MAIAC Lookup Tables (LUTs) are built assuming pseudo-spherical correction in single scattering which has a reduced accuracy for high sun/view zenith angles. A reduced MAIAC performance is expected at solar zenith angles > 78°.
- MAIAC may be missing bright salt pans in several world deserts. In such cases, it may generate a persistent high Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) resulting in missing surface retrievals.
- Because of inherent uncertainties of gridding on the coastline, the area of 1-3 pixels from the coastline may contain frequent artifacts in cloud mask (usually over-detection), AOD (higher values) and surface BRF. Users should exercise caution near the coastline as represented by the AOD QA bit 1010 (See Table 5.4 of the User Guide bits 8-11, 1010 -- AOD within +-2 km from the coastline is replaced by nearby AOD).
- Atmospheric Correction (AC) over detected snow: as MAIAC does not retrieve AOD over snow, it assumes a low climatology AOD=0.05 globally and 0.02 at high elevations (H>4.2 km). Over north-central China, which is often heavily polluted and low AOD assumption can lead to a significant bias, we use AOD averaged over mesoscale area of 150 km using reliable AOD retrievals over snow-free pixels. Such approach does improve quality of AC as compared to low-AOD assumption as judged by the reduced boundaries and color artifacts, but it does not account for the aerosol variability inside 150 km area.
- Ice mask is currently unreliable.
- Effective as of April 14, 2026, the processing of selected overlapping VIIRS MAIAC tiles within the forward stream has been discontinued to eliminate redundant data. A complete list of the excluded tiles can be found at VIIRS MAIAC Reduced Tiles.