This behavior is often evident at the beginning of the swath where the geolocation process attempts to bootstrap itself, often taking a few regions to get running smoothly. In these skipped regions, radiance values of zero with occasional high spikes and regions of echoed image from previous regions may be visible. The resulting image contains a brief vertical smear across the swath. Normally, this phenomenon only lasts for a handful of lines. Unfortunately, all pixels below these regions may suffer from poor downtrack geolocation.
Further explanation follows.
This condition can occur whenever the instrument is put into Local Mode as well as when the Aa camera exposure correction is sent. The later occurs every orbit when the Aa camera begins global mode acquisition. The resultant error is seen most often in the forward and nadir cameras near the beginning of the swath. Often it appears as if the instrument has skipped a few time cycles and didn't output any image lines. In such cases, fill values are reported instead of radiances in the terrain product.