The Thematic Mapper (TM) onboard the Landsat 5 (L5) has provided an unprecedented amount of earth observations for more than 25 years since its launch on March 1, 1984. The MODIS sensor onboard the Aqua satellite is a part of the afternoon constellation of spacecraft and has been successfully providing near-continuous observations of the earth’s surface and atmosphere since July 2002. A synergistic use of TM and MODIS reflective solar bands (RSB) measurements is immensely beneficial to the broad user community for different land cover change and global climate studies. A consistent radiometric calibration between the sensors is a prerequisite for creating high quality science products. Various pseudo-invariant calibration sites (PICS) identified by CEOS have been widely used to monitor the on-orbit calibration consistency for a number of sensors. Near-simultaneous observations of the Saharan PICS by L5 TM and Aqua MODIS are used in this study. The top-of-atmosphere (TOA) reflectance from the spectrally matching RSB are corrected for test site Bi-directional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF), relative spectral response (RSR) mismatch, and impacts for atmospheric water-vapor, and used to estimate the long-term calibration differences between the two sensors. The Operational Land Imager (OLI) onboard the Landsat 8 (L8) launched in February, 2013, is a follow-on mission to maintain the continuity of Landsat acquisitions. A similar cross-calibration methodology was extended to compare the spectrally matching bands of Aqua MODIS with OLI. A long-term drift is observed in bands 1 (3.7%) and 3 (1.86%) of L5 TM, which is expected to be mitigated in the next calibration coefficient update. With the exception of the SWIR-2 band (L5 TM band 7), the agreement with Aqua MODIS is seen to be within 4%. The L8 OLI and Aqua MODIS agreement is seen within 4% across all wavelengths.

Date Published: 26 September 2014
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 9218, Earth Observing Systems XIX, 92180K (26 September 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2062165

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9218:
Earth Observing Systems XIX
James J. Butler; Xiaoxiong (Jack) Xiong; Xingfa Gu, Editor(s)