Landsat 5 and Landsat 7 Thermal Calibration

Research Team: John Schott, Nina Raqueño, Tim Gallagher

Sponsor: NASA

Project Scope: DIRS has had a long history of supporting the thermal calibration of NASA's suite of Landsat satellites. During this year DIRS continued to monitor the thermal performance of both Landsat 5 TM and Landsat 7 ETM+ band 6 sensors.

The sensor performance is compared to ground truth temperatures collected from Lake Ontario and Lake Erie . Surface measurements are augmented with simultaneous thermal imagery with RIT's MISI airborne sensor (cf. Figure 3.7-1). The specific atmospheric conditions are taken into account by implementing an interpolated atmospheric profile within MODTRAN. Final calibration results are reported as a comparison of sensor reaching radiances and known surface radiances propagated to sensor altitude (cf. Figure 7-2).

Figure 7-1 Example of Landsat 7 thermal imagery (left) of Lake Ontario with ground collection sites indicated in green and buoy locations indicated in red. Higher resolution thermal MISI imagery of the Rochester shoreline is shown on the right

Figure 7-2 Results are reported as a comparison of sensor predicted radiances to ground based observations. Early Spring 2006 results for Landsat 7 are shown here