J. S. Czapla-Myers | USGS Science

USGS2016

Landsat-7 ETM+ radiometric calibration status

Now in its 17th year of operation, the Enhanced Thematic Mapper + (ETM+), on board the Landsat-7 satellite, continues to systematically acquire imagery of the Earth to add to the 40+ year archive of Landsat data. Characterization of the ETM+ on-orbit radiometric performance has been on-going since its launch in 1999. The radiometric calibration of the reflective bands is still monitored using on-board calibration devices, though the Pseudo-Invariant Calibration Sites (PICS) method has proven to be an effective tool as well. The calibration gains were updated in April 2013 based primarily on PICS results, which corrected for a change of as much as -0.2%/year degradation in the worst case bands. A new comparison with the SADE database of PICS results indicates no additional degradation in the updated calibration. PICS data are still being tracked though the recent trends are not well understood. The thermal band calibration was updated last in October 2013 based on a continued calibration effort by NASA/Jet Propulsion Lab and Rochester Institute of Technology. The update accounted for a 0.036 W/m 2 sr μm or 0.26K at 300K bias error. The updated lifetime trend is now stable to within +/- 0.4K.

Conference Paper↗

USGS2012

Landsat-7 ETM+: 12 years on-orbit reflective-band radiometric performance

The Landsat-7 ETM+ sensor has been operating on orbit for more than 12 years, and characterizations of its performance have been ongoing over this period. In general, the radiometric performance of the instrument has been remarkably stable: 1) noise performance has degraded by 2% or less overall, with a few detectors displaying step changes in noise of 2% or less; 2) coherent noise frequencies and magnitudes have generally been stable, though the within-scan amplitude variation of the 20 kHz noise in bands 1 and 8 disappeared with the failure of the scan line corrector and a new similar frequency noise (now about 18 kHz) has appeared in two detectors in band 5 and increased in magnitude with time; 3) bias stability has been better than 0.25 DN out of a normal value of 15 DN in high gain; 4) relative gains, the differences in response between the detectors in the band, have generally changed by 0.1% or less over the mission, with the exception of a few detectors with a step response change of 1% or less; and 5) gain stability averaged across all detectors in a band, which is related to the stability of the absolute calibration, has been more stable than the techniques used to measure it. Due to the inability to confirm changes in the gain (beyond a few detectors that have been corrected back to the band average), ETM+ reflective band data continues to be calibrated with the prelaunch measured gains. In the worst case, some bands may have changed as much as 2% in uncompensated absolute calibration over the 12 years.

IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing↗