Overview of on-orbit calibration for the thermal emissive band of the FY-3C MERSI and its performance

Abstract

The Medium Resolution Spectral Imager (MERSI) on the Fengyun-3C (FY-3C) satellite has been operated for many years and provide a large number of science data for studying the global climate change and natural disaster monitoring. To maintain the measurement accuracy, on-orbit calibration are conducted regularly. This paper provide an overview of FY-3C/MERSI Thermal Emissive Band (TEB) calibration and its performance. By using the on-board data taken on June 2014, the variation tendency of BB temperature are analyzed, which shows some slight changes but less than 0.35 %. To consider the stability of instrument, there have differences between different detectors and different sides of the scan mirrors, but for a certain detector, the variation is within ± 0.5 %, which shows the performance of MERSI is very stable.