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The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) instrument is the key payload onboard NOAA’s series of Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES-R) that provides high-quality earth imagery to improve the weather forecasts and environmental change studies over the Western Hemisphere. GOES-16 was launched on 19 November 2016 and became the GOES-East satellite at 75.2 West on 18 December 2017. As the first satellite in the series, it overcame a number of anomalies in the first few years of operation but has performed well since the calibration was stabilized in April 2019. On the other hand, GOES-17, launched on 1 March 2018 and became GOES-West at 137.2 West on 12 February 2019, suffered a malfunction of the cooling system, which called for quite a different operation and calibration configurations. This talk is a summary of the on-orbit radiometric calibration performances for the GOES-16/17 ABI Infrared (IR) channels. The GOES-16 IR radiance is well calibrated and very stable at various temporal and spatial scales after the two major IR ground system updates in its early in-orbit time. The overall radiometric calibration accuracy of GOES-17 IR channels during the stable period is comparable with that of GOES-16. One exception is that the bias to the reference is relatively large for GOES-17 Ch16 due to the shift of its spectral response function caused by the elevated operational temperature. This talk will also include the impacts of the major calibration events for the GOES-17 ABI IR data after its operation, including the implementation of the predictive calibration (pCal) algorithm in July 2019 to improve the radiometric calibration accuracy at satellite night time, salvaged imagery with the cooling timeline in the peak thermal stress days around the eclipse seasons, change of FPM set-point temperatures in late 2021 and early 2022, and the large-scale best detector select (BDS) updates in December 2021.
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