Volume 9 Issue 4
Evaluation of Radiometric Performance for the Thermal Infrared Sensor Onboard Landsat 8
Huazhong Ren, Chen Du, Rongyuan Liu, Qiming Qin, Jinjie Meng, Zhao-Liang Li and Guangjian Yan
1Institute of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
2State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, School of Geography, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
3Key Laboratory of Agri-Informatics, Ministry of Agriculture/Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing 100081, China
4ICube Laboratory, Université de Strasbourg, 67412 Illkirch, France
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Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
The radiometric performance of remotely-sensed images is important for the applications of such data in monitoring land surface, ocean and atmospheric status. One requirement placed on the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) onboard Landsat 8 was that the noise-equivalent change in temperature (NEΔT) should be ≤0.4 K at 300 K for its two thermal infrared bands. In order to optimize the use of TIRS data, this study investigated the on-orbit NEΔT of the TIRS two bands from a scene-based method using clear-sky images over uniform ground surfaces, including lake, deep ocean, snow, desert and Gobi, as well as dense vegetation. Results showed that the NEΔTs of the two bands were 0.051 and 0.06 K at 300 K, which exceeded the design specification by an order of magnitude. The effect of NEΔT on the land surface temperature (LST) retrieval using a split window algorithm was discussed, and the estimated NEΔT could contribute only 3.5% to the final LST error in theory, whereas the required NEΔT could contribute up to 26.4%. Low NEΔT could improve the application of TIRS images. However, efforts are needed in the future to remove the effects of unwanted stray light that appears in the current TIRS images.
Keywords:Landsat 8; Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS); radiometric performance; NEΔT; calibration