Vicarious radiometric calibration/validation of Landsat-8 operational land imager using a ground reflected radiance-based approach with Baotou site in China

Radiometric calibration of the Landsat-8 operational land imager (OLI) sensor is a key step that enables additional quantitative research and application of the data. This study introduces a ground reflected radiance-based approach to vicarious radiometric validate the Landsat-8 OLI onboard radiometric calibration results. Vicarious radiometric calibration/validation field campaign of the Landsat-8 OLI sensor was carried out at the Baotou site in Inner Mongolia, China, on March 27, 2015, October 28, 2015, March 29, 2016, and April 21, 2016. The relative errors of the OLI bands are within 5% for the ground reflected radiance-based approach when compared with satellite observations of top of atmosphere (TOA) radiance in the OLI bands, and the average 1 sigma standard deviation of the four results using the vicarious radiometric calibration is less than 0.025. A well-calibrated Terra MODIS sensor was used to cross-validate the Landsat-8 OLI sensor, and the relative errors are within 10%. The results suggest that the OLI onboard the Landsat-8 satellite displays stable radiometric performance for the four calibration/validation days. An uncertainty analysis of the ground reflected radiance-based approach showed an overall uncertainty of less than 4.5%, taking into account uncertainty sources, including surface characteristics, atmospheric characteristics, radiative transfer, solar irradiance, and the calibration model. (c) The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.