Landsat 4 Thematic Mapper Calibration Update

Abstract

The Landsat 4 Thematic Mapper (TM) collected imagery of the Earth's surface from 1982 to 1993. Although largely overshadowed by Landsat 5 which was launched in 1984, Landsat 4 TM imagery extends the TM-based record of the Earth back to 1982 and also substantially supplements the image archive collected by Landsat 5. To provide a consistent calibration record for the TM instruments, Landsat 4 TM was cross-calibrated to Landsat 5 using nearly simultaneous overpass imagery of pseudo-invariant calibration sites (PICS) in the time period of 1988-1990. To determine if the radiometric gain of Landsat 4 had changed over its lifetime, time series from two PICS locations (a Saharan site known as Libya 4 and a site in southwest North America, commonly referred to as the Sonoran Desert site) were developed. The results indicated that Landsat 4 had been very stable over its lifetime, with no discernible degradation in sensor performance in all reflective bands except band 1. In contrast, band 1 exhibited a 12% decay in responsivity over the lifetime of the instrument. Results from this paper have been implemented at USGS EROS, which enables users of Landsat TM data sets to obtain consistently calibrated data from Landsat 4 and 5 TM as well as Landsat 7 ETM+ instruments.