Development of an Operational Calibration Methodology for the Landsat Thermal Data Archive and Initial Testing of the Atmospheric Compensation Component of a Land Surface Temperature (LST) Product from the Archive

Abstract

Abstract:The Landsat program has been producing an archive of thermal imagery that spans the globe and covers 30 years of the thermal history of the planet at human scales (60-120 m). Most of that archive's absolute radiometric calibration has been fixed through vicarious calibration techniques. These calibration ties to trusted values have often taken a year or more to gather sufficient data and, in some cases, it has been over a decade before calibration certainty has been established. With temperature being such a critical factor for all living systems and the ongoing concern over the impacts of climate change, NASA and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) are leading efforts to provide timely and accurate temperature data from the Landsat thermal data archive. This paper discusses two closely related advances that are critical steps toward providing timely and reliable temperature image maps from Landsat. The first advance involves the development and testing of an autonomous procedure for gathering and performing initial screening of large amounts of vicarious calibration data. The second advance discussed in this paper is the per-pixel atmospheric compensation of the data to permit calculation of the emitted surface radiance (using ancillary sources of emissivity data) and the corresponding land surface temperature (LST).

Field-scale mapping of evaporative stress indicators of crop yield: An application over Mead, NE, USA

“…Excluding scenes with snow cover and/ or > 30% cloud cover, a total of 138 scenes of Landsat multiband and surface reflectance images were processed, with an average frequency of two weeks between images and a maximum gap of 32 days (Table 2). Landsat LST was derived from thermal band observations by atmospherically correcting at-sensor brightness temperature via MODTRAN (Berk et al, 1989) following procedures documented by Cook et al (2014). The resulting LST maps at native spatial resolution of 120 m (Landsat 5), 60 m (Landsat 7) or 100 m (Landsat 8) were sharpened to the 30-m resolution of the Landsat reflectance bands using a Data Mining Sharpener (DMS) technique (Gao et al, 2012a).…”

Landsat-8 Sensor Characterization and Calibration

“…Czapla-Myers et al [14] reports on the vicarious calibration of OLI and Mishra et al, [15] and Flood [16] examine OLI's cross calibration with Landsat-7 ETM+. Barsi et al [17] and Cook et al [18] focus on the vicarious calibration of the TIRS instrument.…”

A Temperature and Emissivity Separation Algorithm for Landsat-8 Thermal Infrared Sensor Data

“…While the out-of-field stray light is small enough in band 10, the effect in band 11 is larger and studies Ground LST (K) Retrieved LST (K) suggest that band 11 data should not be used for quantitative analysis at present [57,59]. Therefore, the accuracy could be better if the calibration issue of TIRS band 11 is resolved in the future.…”