Absolute vicarious calibration of Landsat-8 OLI and Resourcesat-2 AWiFS sensors over Rann of Kutch site in Gujarat

Abstract

In this work, vicarious calibration coefficients for all the four bands (green, red, NIR and SWIR) of Resourcesat-2 AWiFS sensor for four dates during Dec 2013-Nov 2014 and for seven bands (blue, green, red, NIR, SWIR1, SWIR2 and PAN) of OLI sensor onboard Landsat-8 for six dates during Dec 2013-Feb 2015 were estimated using field measured reflectance and measured atmospheric parameters during sensor image acquisition over Rann of Kutch site in Gujarat. The top of atmosphere (TOA) at-satellite radiances for all the bands were simulated using 6S radiative transfer code with field measured reflectance, synchronous atmospheric measurements and respective sensor’s spectral response functions as an input. These predicted spectral radiances were compared with the radiances from the respective sensor’s image in the respective band over the calibration site. Cross-calibration between the sensors AWiFS and OLI was also attempted using near-simultaneous same day image acquisition. Effect of spectral band adjustment factor was also studied with OLI sensor taken as reference sensor. Results show that the variation in average estimated radiance ratio for the AWiFS sensor was found to be within 10% for all the bands, whereas, for OLI sensor, the variation was found to be within 6% for all the bands except green and SWIR2 for which the variation was 8% and 11% respectively higher than the 5% uncertainty of the OLI sensor specification for TOA spectral radiance. At the 1σ level, red, NIR, SWIR1 and Panchromatic bands of OLI sensor showed close agreement between sensor-measured and vicarious TOA radiance resulting no change in calibration coefficient and hence indicating no sensor degradation. Two sets of near-simultaneous SBAFs were derived from respective ground measured target reflectance profiles and applied to the AWiFS and it was observed that overall, SBAF compensation provides a significant improvement in sensor agreement. The reduction in the difference between AWiFS and OLI measured TOA reflectance was found to be within 1% for green band and within 0.5% for Red band, whereas, maximum difference was observed for NIR band (within 3.4%) after applying SBAF correction.