NOAA GOES-R Series Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) Level 2 Volcanic Ash: Detection and Height (VAA)

The Volcanic Ash: Detection and Height product contains two images with pixel values identifying volcanic ash cloud height and volcanic ash mass loading. The ash cloud top height is the geopotential height of the ash cloud top. The ash mass loading in the mass of volcanic ash per unit of area. The product includes two types of data quality information. One type of data quality indicator describes the quality of the volcanic ash detection, providing an assessment of the presence of volcanic ash for on-earth pixels including an indication of good or degraded quality, or invalid pixels, and the confidence in the detection of volcanic ash existing in single and multiple layers. The second type of data quality indicator provides information about the quality and ash characteristics of the retrieval for on-earth pixels, identifying failure conditions, cloud top temperature, cloud emissivity, and absorbed optical depth ratio retrieval quality, and the volcanic ash particle size. The units of measure for the ash cloud top height value is meters. The units of measure for the ash mass loading value is metric tons (tonnes) per square kilometer. The Volcanic Ash: Detection and Height product images are produced on the ABI fixed grid at 2 km resolution for the Full Disk coverage region. Product data is produced for geolocated source data to local zenith angles of 90 degrees for both daytime and nighttime conditions.