The Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) has been collecting imagery of the Earth since its launch aboard Landsat 8 in early 2013. In many respects, TIRS has been exceeding its performance requirements on orbit, particularly in terms of noise and stability. However, several artifacts have been observed in the TIRS data which include banding and absolute calibration discrepancies that violate requirements in some scenes. Banding is undesired structure that appears within and between the focal plane array assemblies. In addition, in situ measurements have shown an error in the TIRS absolute radiometric calibration that appears to vary with season and location within the image. The source of these artifacts has been determined to be out-of-field radiance that scatters onto the detectors thereby adding a non-uniform signal across the field-of-view. The magnitude of this extra signal can be approximately 8% or higher (band 11) and is generally twice as large in band 11 as it is in band 10. A series of lunar scans were obtained to gather information on the source of this out-of-field radiance. Analyses of these scans have produced a preliminary map of stray light, or ghost, source locations in the TIRS out-of-field area. This dataset has been used Remote Sens. 2014, 11 10436 to produce a synthetic TIRS scene that closely reproduces the banding effects seen in actual TIRS imagery. Now that the cause of the banding has been determined, a stray light optics model is in development that will pin-point the cause of the stray light source. Several methods are also being explored to correct for the banding and the absolute calibration error in TIRS imagery.

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The Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) on Landsat 8 is the latest thermal sensor in that series of missions. Unlike the previous single-channel sensors, TIRS uses two channels to cover the 10–12.5 micron band. It is also a pushbroom imager; a departure from the previous whiskbroom approach. Nevertheless, the instrument requirements are defined such that data continuity is maintained. This paper describes the design of the TIRS instrument, the results of pre-launch calibration measurements and shows an example of initial on-orbit science performance compared to Landsat 7.

The Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) requirements for noise, stability, and uniformity were designed to ensure the radiometric integrity of the data products. Since the launch of Landsat 8 in February 2013, many of these evaluations have been based on routine measurements of the onboard calibration sources, which include a variable-temperature blackbody and a deep space view port. The noise equivalent change in temperature (NEdT) of TIRS data is approximately 0.05 K @ 300 K in both bands, exceeding requirements by about a factor of 8 and Landsat 7 ETM+ performance by a factor of 3. Coherent noise is not readily apparent in TIRS data. No apparent change in the detector linearization has been observed. The radiometric stability of the TIRS instrument over the period between radiometric calibrations (about 40 min) is less than one count of dark current and the variation in terms of radiance is less than 0.015 W/m 2 /sr/µm (or 0.13 K) at 300 K, easily meeting the short term stability requirements. Long term stability analysis has indicated a degradation of about 0.2% or less per year. The operational calibration is only updated using the biases taken every orbit, due to the fundamental stability of the instrument. By combining the data from two active detector rows per band, 100% detector operability is maintained for the instrument. No trends in the noise, operability, or short term radiometric stability are apparent over the mission life. The uniformity performance is more difficult to Remote Sens. 2014, 6 11754 evaluate as scene-varying banding artifacts have been observed in Earth imagery. Analyses have shown that stray light is affecting the recorded signal from the Earth and inducing the banding depending on the content of the surrounding Earth surface. As the stray light effects are stronger in the longer wavelength TIRS band11 (12.0 µm), the uniformity is better in the shorter wavelength band10 (10.9 µm). Both bands have exceptional noise and stability performance and band10 has generally adequate uniformity performance and should currently be used in preference to band11. The product uniformity will improve with the stray light corrections being developed.

The science-focused mission of the Landsat 8 Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) requires that it have an accurate radiometric calibration. A calibration methodology was developed to convert the raw output from the instrument into an accurate at-aperture radiance. The methodology is based on measurements obtained during component-level and instrument-level characterization testing. The radiometric accuracy from the pre-flight measurements was estimated to be approximately 0.7%. The calibration parameters determined pre-flight were updated during the post-launch checkout period by utilizing the on-board calibration sources and Earth scene data. These relative corrections were made to adjust for differences between the pre-flight and the on-orbit performance of the instrument, thereby correcting large striping artifacts observed in Earth imagery. Despite this calibration correction, banding artifacts (low frequency variation in the across-track direction) have been observed in certain uniform Earth scenes, but not in other uniform scenes. In addition, the absolute calibration performance determined from vicarious measurements have revealed a time-varying error to the absolute radiance reported by TIRS. These issues were determined to not be caused by the calibration process developed for the instrument. Instead, an investigation has revealed that stray light is affecting the recorded signal from the Earth. The varying optical stray light effect is an ongoing subject of evaluation and investigation, and a correction strategy is being devised that will be added to the calibration process.Remote Sens. 2014, 6 8804

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The split window technique has been used for over thirty years to derive surface temperatures of the Earth with image data collected from spaceborne sensors containing two thermal channels. The latest NASA/USGS Landsat satellites contain the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) instruments that acquire Earth data in two longwave infrared bands, as opposed to a single band with earlier Landsats. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) will soon begin releasing a surface temperature product for Landsats 4 through 8 based on the single spectral channel methodology. However, progress is being made toward developing and validating a more accurate and less computationally intensive surface temperature product based on the split window method for Landsat 8 and 9 datasets. This work presents the progress made towards developing an operational split window algorithm for TIRS. Specifically, details of how the generalized split window algorithm was tailored for the TIRS sensors are presented, along with geometric considerations that should be addressed to avoid spatial artifacts in the final surface temperature product. Validation studies indicate that the proposed algorithm is accurate to within 2 K when compared to land-based measurements and to within 1 K when compared to water-based measurements, highlighting the improved accuracy that may be achieved over the current single-channel methodology being used to derive surface temperature in the Landsat Collection 2 surface temperature product. Surface temperature products using the split window methodologies described here can be made available upon request for testing purposes.

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