Performance of the Landsat 8 Provisional Aquatic Reflectance Product for Inland Waters

Abstract

Recently, the United States Geological Service (USGS) released a new provisional product which estimates aquatic reflectance from Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI), called Landsat 8 Provisional Aquatic Reflectance (L8PAR). However, as indicated in the product guide, the use of this product for inland waters needs further verification and improvements. The goal of this study was to determine how the novel L8PAR product performs for different small turbid and eutrophic lakes in Northern Germany compared to in situ measurements of above water remote sensing reflectance (Rrs). For several recent scenes during our monitoring, the L8PAR product failed to produce full data for the lakes of our interest. For the best scene with in situ spectra, L8PAR was not able to retrieve any information for band 1 and not all information for bands 2, 3 and 4. The pixels with valid values for reflectance showed a weak relationship for band 2 (R2 of 0.24) and a medium relationship for bands 3 and 4 (R2 of 0.68 and 0.72, respectively). Compared to other atmospheric correction routines (ACOLITE, C2RCC, C2X, iCOR and L8SR), L8PAR was the only product which was not able to retrieve Rrs for all match up samples. This work provides an evaluation of the L8PAR product for inland waterbodies. Although more analysis and validation need to be conducted, our study suggests that the L8PAR product cannot be used for small inland lakes in its current state and has to be used with care for inland waters in general.

The Use of Sentinel-2 for Chlorophyll-a Spatial Dynamics Assessment: A Comparative Study on Different Lakes in Northern Germany

“…In this campaign, we retrieved a total of 32 sampling points collected in areas without bottom reflectance and far from the shoreline of these lakes. The location of the individual sampling points for this field campaign can be found in Ogashawara et al [34]. The total in situ data set used in this study encompasses 97 samples of radiometric and limnological measurements.…”

“…Data acquisition and R rs calculation was based on the viewing angles and equations proposed by Mobley [35]. For the irradiance reference, we used a diffuse reflectance target with 20% reflectivity (Zenith lite, SG3145, SphereOptics GmbH, Herrsching, Germany) described in Ogashawara et al [34]. The proximal R rs spectra was used for the computation of bio-optical algorithms as well as to simulate Sentinel-2/MSI image based on the MSI's spectral response function.…”

“…The selection of these atmospheric corrections was based on the routines that were developed for inland waters (ACOLITE, C2RCC, C2X, iCOR and MAIN) and the standard routine for Sentinel-2 imagery (Sen2Cor). Four of these six atmospheric correction routines were recently evaluated for a Landsat 8/Operational Land Imager (OLI) image over our study site and some showed good performances for the OLI image [34].…”

“…In their analysis, C2RCC achieved good performance for inland waters, achieving the lowest root-mean-square deviation (RMSD). Ogashawara et al [34] evaluated the use of ACOLITE, iCOR, C2RCC and C2X atmospheric correction routines for the Landsat 8/OLI images and noticed that ACOLITE was good for the visible range, while C2RCC and C2X performed better in the red to near-infrared spectral bands. Overall, the results presented in Section 3.1 of this study corroborates with previous studies on atmospheric corrections over inland waters.…”

Patterns, Trends and Drivers of Water Transparency in Sri Lanka Using Landsat 8 Observations and Google Earth Engine

“…We estimated remote sensing reflectance (R rs ) from surface reflectance and transformed this to the range of 0 to 1 by using the following Equation ( 2) [42,43]:…”