Radiometric Cross-Calibration of Landsat-8/OLI and GF-1/PMS Sensors Using an Instrumented Sand Site

Abstract

The panchromatic and multispectral (PMS1/PMS2) sensors designed with one panchromatic band and four multispectral bands are two optical cameras on-board the Gao Fen 1 (GF-1) satellite launched on April 26, 2013. The spatial resolution of PMS1/PMS2 are 2 and 8 m of pan and multispectral, respectively. The vicarious calibration of GF-1/PMS was performed by China Centre for Resource Satellite Data and Application, and the calibration coefficients were released once a year. Due to the lack of on-board calibrator, the on-orbit radiometric performance evaluation of the PMS sensors is very important for the further quantitative application of the data. To evaluate the radiometric performance of PMS1 sensor on-board GF-1 satellite, this paper attempts to calibrate PMS1 sensor against the well-calibrated OLI sensor on-board Landsat-8. An instrumented sand site was used, which is located in the national high resolution remote sensing comprehensive calibration site, Baotou, China. The cross-calibration coefficients of PMS1 on October 5, 2015 and August 20, 2016 are calculated and compared with the official calibration coefficients published in 2015 and 2016. The results show that the cross-calibration of PMS sensor using other sensors is necessary, due to the low updating frequency of calibration coefficient for GF-1/PMS sensor. The uncertainty estimation results show that the total uncertainties associated with the cross-calibration of Landsat-8/OLI and GF-1/PMS sensors over a desert site are within 5.5%.