Electronic crosstalk in Terra MODIS thermal emissive bands

Abstract

The MODerate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) is a legacy Earth remote sensing instrument in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Earth Observing System (EOS). The first MODIS instrument was launched in December 1999 on board the Terra spacecraft. MODIS has 36 bands, among which bands 20-25 and bands 27-36 are thermal emissive bands covering a wavelength range from 3.7μm to 14.2μm. It has been found that there are severe contaminations in Terra bands 27-30 (6.7 μm – 9.73 μm) due to crosstalk of signals among themselves. The crosstalk effect induces strong striping artifacts in the Earth View (EV) images and causes large long-term drifts in the EV brightness temperature (BT) in these bands. An algorithm using a linear approximation derived from on-orbit lunar observations has been developed to correct the crosstalk effect for them. It was demonstrated that the crosstalk correction can substantially reduce the striping noise in the EV images and significantly remove the long-term drifts in the EV BT in the Long Wave InfraRed (LWIR) water vapor channels (bands 27-28). In this paper, the crosstalk correction algorithm previously developed is applied to correct the crosstalk effect in the remaining LWIR bands 29 and 30. The crosstalk correction successfully reduces the striping artifact in the EV images and removes long-term drifts in the EV BT in bands 29-30 as was done similarly for bands 27-28. The crosstalk correction algorithm can thus substantially improve both the image quality and the radiometric accuracy of the Level 1B (L1B) products of the LWIR PV bands, bands 27-30. From this study it is also understood that other Terra MODIS thermal emissive bands are contaminated by the crosstalk effect and that the algorithm can be applied to these bands for crosstalk correction.