SATELLITE SENSOR CROSS-CALIBRATION OVER SNOW FIELDS

• Main Authors: Jens Nieke, Teruo Aoki, Tomonori Tanikawa, Hiroki Motoyoshi, Masahiro Hori, Yukinori Nakajima
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Barrow; Alaska
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.599.204

Recently, ADEOS-2 was launched (14 Dec 2002) successfully and the Global Imager (GLI) onboard the ADEOS-2 satellite became operational from April 2003. In a first calibration check-up, the radiometric performance of GLI was compared relatively to that of other sensors on different satellites with different calibration backgrounds. As calibration site a large snowfield near Barrow (Alaska, USA) was used, where space sensors in polar orbits view the same ground target on the same day with small differences in the local crossing times. This is why GLI, MODIS (terra, aqua), SeaWiFS, AHVRR (N16, N17), MERIS and AATSR data sets were selected for the following clear-sky condition days: April 14th and 26th 2003. At the same time ground-truth experiments, e.g., measurements of ground reflectance, BRDF, aerosol optical thickness (AOT), were carried out. Thereinafter, top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiance/reflectance was forward calculated by means of radiative transfer code (RTC) for each sensor, each band and each day. Finally, the vicariously retrieved TOA signal was compared to TOA sensor Level 1B (L1B) data. As a result, GLI’s performance is encouraging at this early time of the mission. GLI and the other 7 sensors deliver similar sensor output in the range of about 5-7 % around the expected vicariously calculated TOA signal.