The increased potential for the Landsat Data Continuity Mission to contribute to case 2 water quality studies

Abstract

The ability to achieve continuous monitoring of the global water supply from satellite imagery is an ongoing effort in the remote sensing community. Historically, sensors such as SeaWiFs and MODIS have been used over the open ocean and along coastal regions to determine the constituents in the water body. Due to their poor spatial resolution, these satellites are ineffective in monitoring many inland and near shore, case 2 waters whose constituents can have large spatial variability. Alternatively, current Landsat instruments have adequate spatial resolution but lack the radiometric fidelity necessary to perform constituent retrieval. In this paper, a new sensor being developed by NASA is introduced that is potentially both spectrally and spatially sufficient for the monitoring of case 2 waters. This study presents the relevant sensor design parameters and initial results of an experiment to determine what impact the improved features of the Landsat Data Continuity Mission's (LDCM) Operational Land Imager (OLI) will have on water resource assessment. Specifically, we investigate how the addition of a deep blue band, 12-bit quantization, and improved signal-to-noise ratios affect our ability to retrieve water constituents. Preliminary results of a simulated case study indicate that the LDCM instrument introduces retrieval errors of less than 6% for three constituents while its predecessor, the Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+), introduces errors of over 20%. This suggests that LDCM's OLI instrument exhibits the potential to be a useful tool for the continuous monitoring of coastal and inland water resources. To actually achieve the potential demonstrated in this study, ongoing work focuses on atmospherically compensating simulated OLI data.