An automatic reflectance-based approach to vicarious radiometric calibrate the Landsat8 operational land imager

In this study, the automatic reflectance-based method is used to vicarious radiometrically calibrate the satellite optical sensors using the desert target located in the Baotou site in China. The ground reflected radiance of the desert target were collected automatically using an automatic observation system. The reflectance of the desert target was calculated with the radiance collected with the automatic observation system and the total irradiance simulated from MODTRAN code based on the atmospheric parameters. Then, the TOA radiance can be predicted with MODTRAN code based on the calculated desert reflectance. The automatic reflectance-based approach was applied to the Landsat 8/OLI sensors, and the TOA radiances calibrated by our method were also compared with the observed TOA radiance calibrated with on-board calibrator. Preliminary results show a good consistent and the mean relative difference of the multispectral channels is less than 5%. Uncertainty analysis also show that the TOA radiance overall uncertainty is less than 4% due to the source including the atmospheric characteristics, surface characteristics, and the selected calibration model.