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The Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory (CLARREO) mission was recommended by the National Research Council in 2007 to conduct highly accurate and International System of Unit-traceable decadal change observations and provide an on-orbit intercalibration standard with high accuracy for relevant Earth observing sensors. The goal of reference intercalibration is to enable rigorous observations of critical climate change variables, including reflected broadband radiation, cloud properties, and changes in surface albedo, including snow and ice albedo feedback, to be made consistently among different sensors. This requires the CLARREO Reflected Solar Spectrometer (RSS) to provide highly accurate spectral reflectance measurements to establish an on-orbit reference with a radiometric accuracy requirement better than 0.3% (k = 2) for existing sensors. In this paper, MODTRAN-simulated top-of-atmosphere spectral data and spectral measurements from the SCIAMACHY instrument on Envisat are used to determine sensitivity of intercalibration uncertainty on key design parameters of the CLARREO spectrometer: spectral range, sampling and resolution. Their impact on intercalibration uncertainty for MODIS and VIIRS imagers is estimated for various surface types (ocean, vegetation, desert, snow, deep convective clouds, clouds and all-sky). Results indicate that for the visible to near-infrared spectral region (465-856 nm), the RSS instrument under current design concept produces uncertainties of 0.16% for the spectral range and 0.3% for the sampling and resolution. However, for the water vapor absorption bands in the short wavelength infrared region (1242-1629 nm), the same requirement is not met for sampling and resolution due to their high sensitivity to the influence of atmospheric water vapor.