From the Landsat program's inception in 1972 to the present, the earth science user community has benefited from a historical record of remotely sensed data. The multispectral data from the Landsat 5 (L5) Thematic Mapper (TM) sensor provide the backbone for this extensive archive. Historically, the radiometric calibration procedure for this imagery used the instrument's response to the Internal Calibrator (IC) on a scene-by-scene basis to determine the gain and offset for each detector. The IC system degraded with time causing radiometric calibration errors up to 20 percent. In May 2003 the National Landsat Archive Production System (NLAPS) was updated to use a gain model rather than the scene acquisition specific IC gains to calibrate TM data processed in the United States. Further modification of the gain model was performed in 2007. L5 TM data that were processed using IC prior to the calibration update do not benefit from the recent calibration revisions. A procedure has been developed to give users the ability to recalibrate their existing Level-1 products. The best recalibration results are obtained if the work order report that was originally included in the standard data product delivery is available. However, many users may not have the original work order report. In such cases, the IC gain look-up table that was generated using the radiometric gain trends recorded in the NLAPS database can be used for recalibration. This paper discusses the procedure to recalibrate L5 TM data when the work order report originally used in processing is not available. A companion paper discusses the generation of the NLAPS IC gain and bias look-up tables required to perform the recalibration.

Date Published: 21 August 2008
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 7081, Earth Observing Systems XIII, 708114 (21 August 2008); doi: 10.1117/12.795652

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7081:
Earth Observing Systems XIII
James J. Butler; Jack Xiong, Editor(s)