Abstract

The Sonoran Desert, which is located in North America, has been frequently used for vicarious calibration of many optical sensors in satellites. Although the desert area has good conditions for vicarious calibration (e.g. high reflectance, little vegetation, large area, low precipitation), its adjacency to the sea and large variability in atmospheric water vapor are the disadvantages for vicarious calibration. For vicarious calibration using top-of-atmospheric (TOA) reflectance, the atmospheric variability brings about degraded precision in vicarious calibration results. In this paper, the location with the smallest radiometric variability in TOA reflectance is sought by using 12-year Landsat 5 data, and corrected the TOA reflectance for bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) which is another major source of variability in TOA reflectance. Experiments show that the mid-western part of the Sonoran Desert has the smallest variability collectively for visible and near-infrared bands, and the variability from the suntarget-sensor geometry can be reduced by the BRDF correction for the visible bands, but not sufficiently for the infrared bands.

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