Community Satellite Processing Package

  CSPP VIIRS Flood Detection Software Version 2.0 Release

24 July 2025

New release of the NOAA VIIRS I-Band resolution Flood Detection Software in support of NOAA-21, NOAA-20 and S-NPP satellites. This CSPP release (CSPP Version 2.0), provides NOAA/NESDIS/STAR JPSS Enterprise Environmental Data Record (EDR) VIIRS Flood Detection Software Version 2.0, adapted and tested for operation in a real-time direct broadcast environment.

The software contains binary executable files and supporting static data files, as well as input and output files for verification of a successful installation.

The CSPP VIIRS Flood Detection software is designed for global automatic flood detection using VIIRS Sensor Data Record (SDR) inputs. The software can be successfully executed under the following conditions:
  • Day time datasets, where the input SDR metadata "N_Day_Night_Flag" is either “Day” or “Both”. The software will process granules within a pass where the Solar Zenith Angle is generally less than 80 degrees. This varies with season, from 76 to 85 degrees.
  • Land datasets with latitudes between 80°N and 80°S.
  • Sensor Zenith angles less than 70°.
  • When using an Area of Interest (AOI) file, some portion of the subset boundaries fall within the overpass data coverage.
What is New in CSPP Flood Version 2.0?

This release includes significant changes from previous versions.

  • Added support for NOAA-21 VIIRS.
  • Execution script name and options have changed.
  • Multi-core processor option and optimizations result in a significant improvement in execution speeds.
  • Flood mapping category values have changed.
  • Enterprise software provided by NOAA JPSS ASSISTT.
  • Output files are NetCDF4 format; previous versions were HDF4.
  • Output files use standard EDR naming conventions.
  • Output files are single granule. This includes the Area-Of-Interest (AOI) output files. A script to merge output granule-based GeoTIFF files is included.
  • VIIRS Cloud Mask use has been removed as an optional input.
Output Products

The output product is one NetCDF4 file per granule that contains a Short Integer array named “WaterDetection” for each reprojected 375 m image element. The “WaterDetection” values correspond to the following categories:
  • 1: No valid data
  • 15: Open water without water fraction retrieval
  • 16: Clear-sky bare land
  • 17: Clear-sky vegetation
  • 20: Snow cover
  • 27: River/lake ice cover
  • 30: Cloud cover
  • 38: Supra-snow/ice water, mixed ice and water or melting Ice
  • 50: Cloud or terrain shadow
  • 99: Open normal water: river, lake, reservoir, ocean
  • 100-200: Floodwater Fraction
Scripts are included in this release that can create and concatenate color enhanced 8 bit GeoTIFF images from output Flood Detection NetCDF4 files.

System Requirements

  • Intel or AMD CPU with 64-bit instruction support,
  • 16 GB RAM,
  • Rocky Linux 8.10 64-bit Linux; the software has also been tested on Rocky Linux 9,
  • 35 GB of disk space (plus space for your own DB data and CSPP Flood products).

The software, installation guide and test data are available at the CSPP Download site.


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