Imager-to-radiometer in-flight cross calibration: RSP radiometric comparison...

McCorkel, J., B. Cairns, and A. Wasilewski (2016), Imager-to-radiometer in-flight cross calibration: RSP radiometric comparison with airborne and satellite sensors, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 9, 955-962, doi:10.5194/amt-9-955-2016.
Abstract: 

This work develops a method to compare the radiometric calibration between a radiometer and imagers hosted on aircraft and satellites. The radiometer is the airborne Research Scanning Polarimeter (RSP), which takes multi-angle, photo-polarimetric measurements in several spectral channels. The RSP measurements used in this work were coincident with measurements made by the Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS), which was on the same aircraft. These airborne measurements were also coincident with an overpass of the Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI). First we compare the RSP and OLI radiance measurements to AVIRIS since the spectral response of the multispectral instruments can be used to synthesize a spectrally equivalent signal from the imaging spectrometer data. We then explore a method that uses AVIRIS as a transfer between RSP and OLI to show that radiometric traceability of a satellite-based imager can be used to calibrate a radiometer despite differences in spectral channel sensitivities. This calibration transfer shows agreement within the uncertainty of both the various instruments for most spectral channels.

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Research Program: 
Radiation Science Program (RSP)