The Remote Sensing Group at the University of Arizona has used ground-based test sites for the vicarious calibration of airborne and satellite-based sensors. Past work has focused on high-spatial-resolution sensors that are well- suited to the reflectance-, irradiance-, and radiance-based methods. Application of these methods to the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) with its lower spatial resolution pose a challenge for vicarious calibraiton. This work presents a cross-calibration approach using the high spatial resolution sensor Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (TEM+) on the Landat-7 platform that allows the reflectance-based results of ETM+ to be scaled to the larger footprint of MODIS. This calibration takes into account the changes in solar zenith angle due to the 40- minute separation in overpass times of the two sensors which view the test sites on the same day with the same view angle. Also included are corrections due to the spectral differences between the sensors. Early results show that MODIS and ETM+ agree to better than 5% in the solar reflective for bands not affected by atmospheric absorption.

Date Published: 18 January 2002
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 4483, Earth Observing Systems VI, (18 January 2002);

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4483:
Earth Observing Systems VI
William L. Barnes, Editor(s)