A Novel Radiometric Cross-Calibration of GF-6/WFV With MODIS at the Dunhuang Radiometric Calibration Site

To obtain more abundant target information for vegetation remote sensing research, the wide field of view (WFV) of the GaoFen-6 (GF-6) satellite utilizes eight bands, including four new bands. Unfortunately, it finds the unavailable reference bands from well-calibrated sensors to implement radiometric cross-calibration of the WFV sensor for these new bands, which severely affects the radiometric quality estimation and the radiometric degradation detection of WFV. Therefore, taking the Dunhuang radiometric calibration site (DRCS) in China as the radiometric transfer platform and treating the moderate-resolution imaging spectroradiometer as a reference sensor, a novel radiometric cross-calibration method for WFV is proposed. The validation results show that compared with the official calibration coefficients (OCCs) published by the China centre for resources satellite data and application (CRESDA), the proposed method can obtain reliable radiometric cross-calibration results for each band even without available corresponding reference bands. Moreover, the influences of the interpolation method and the spectral band adjustment factor (SBAF) correction on the calibration results are discussed. The total radiometric cross-calibration uncertainty is less than 4.33%.

Automated summary

A novel radiometric cross-calibration method for the WFV sensor is proposed in this article, using the DRCS in China and MODIS as reference sensors. Reliable calibration results can be obtained even without available corresponding reference bands, with a total uncertainty of less than 4.33%.