Validation of the TOA Products of the Baotou Sandy Site With Landsat8/OLI Considering BRDF Correction

Abstract

The Baotou sandy site in China is an important field site in the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites radiometric calibration network (RadCalNet), which freely releases the bottom-of-atmosphere (BOA) and top-of-atmosphere (TOA) spectral reflectance products in the spectral range from 400 nm to 1000 nm at 10 nm intervals with the aid of a set of automatic spectral and atmospheric parameter measurement devices. However, the released TOA and BOA spectral reflectance products are nadir-view spectral reflectance, which could produce errors if the Baotou sandy site is offset from the nadir point when they are utilized to calibrate one satellite sensor with the vicarious calibration method or to detect radiometric performance changes in the target sensor. Therefore, to address this problem and further broaden the applicable scopes of TOA spectral reflectance products, this article develops TOA and BOA bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) models using valid time-series TOA and BOA spectral reflectance products to fulfil BRDF correction. Then, the corrected TOA spectral reflectance is validated with the on-orbit measured TOA spectral reflectance of the Landsat8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) sensor with high and stable radiometric performance. After analysing the fitting accuracies of the BOA and TOA BRDF models, the influences of the filter criteria of valid time-series nadir-view BOA and TOA spectral reflectance, geo-positioning error of Landsat8/OLI, and aerosol type in the BOA BRDF correction process on the validation results are discussed. The results show that the BOA BRDF model obtains a better correction effect and is more stable than the TOA BRDF model.