Abstract
The availability of new generation multispectral sensors of the Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 satellite platforms offers unprecedented opportunities for long-term high-frequency monitoring applications. The present letter aims at highlighting some potentials and challenges deriving from the spectral and spatial characteristics of the two instruments. Some comparisons between corresponding bands and band combinations were performed on the basis of different datasets: the first consists of a set of simulated images derived from a hyperspectral Hyperion image, the other five consist instead of pairs of real images (Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2A) acquired on the same date, over five areas. Results point out that in most cases the two sensors can be well combined; however, some issues arise regarding near-infrared bands when Sentinel-2 data are combined with both Landsat 8 and older Landsat images.
Highlights
Thanks to the availability of the new generation of medium resolution multispectral sensors installed on board the Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 satellite platforms, new opportunities for long-term high-frequency monitoring applications have been disclosed
The present paper aims at pointing out the spectral differences between Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Sentinel-2 Multispectral Instruments (MSI) sensors, in the perspective of a combined use of the two for time series analyses
A reflectance of 10% in the red band of the OLI sensor is expected to range between 9.6% and 10.2% in the corresponding MSI band, according to the regression lines computed from the real images analysed here
Summary
Thanks to the availability of the new generation of medium resolution multispectral sensors installed on board the Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 satellite platforms, new opportunities for long-term high-frequency monitoring applications have been disclosed. Thanks to the 12-bit quantization, these sensors provide an improved radiometric quality, which can expand the range of applications for ocean and inland water monitoring (e.g., [1]). Landsat 8 was launched in 2013, and its Operational Land Imager (OLI) provides high quality multispectral images at the resolution of 30 metres (15 for panchromatic) and a revisiting time of 16 days [2,3]. The Sentinel-2 mission provides for a combination of two satellites—Sentinel-2A and Sentinel-2B—equipped with identical Multispectral Instruments (MSI) capable of acquiring data in 13 bands at different spatial resolutions (between 10 m and 60 m). The MSI has a very wide field of view (290 km swath width, which is significantly larger than the 185 km of the OLI)
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