Landsat 8: Promise and Performance
Abstract
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) on February 11, 2013 placing the eighth satellite in the Landsat series in orbit. The U.S. Geological Survey assumed responsibility for operations following a 100-day commissioning period and promptly renamed the satellite Landsat 8 on May 30, 2013. The satellite and its sensor payload, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) and the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS), have performed magnificently since launch. The OLI signal-to-noise performance, for example, exceeds specifications by factors greater than 1.5 for every spectral band. TIRS is providing data with noise-equivalent-changes-in-temperature of less then 0.1 Kelvin compared to requirements of 0.4 Kelvin for its two thermal bands. The geometry of the images is also excellent with band-to-band registration accuracy, for example, of no more than 3.0 m for the OLI bands. The Landsat 8 level 1 data products are orthorectified and registered to the Universal Transverse Mercator cartographic projection with an uncertainty less than 5 m for OLI 30 m pixels and less than 35 m for TIRS 100 m pixels. The only exception to full specification compliance lies with the TIRS radiometric calibration. Discrepancies have been noted between calibrated Landsat 8 thermal data, TIRS Bands 10 and 11, and surface water temperature measurements collected to validate thermal band calibration. Surface water temperatures derived from TIRS data, after correction for atmospheric transmission and emissivity, are warmer than measured surface water temperatures by 2 K or more. This indicates a possible bias or other error in TIRS calibration that places the calibration uncertainty beyond the specified performance of 2 percent. Analysts continue to compare TIRS data to surface temperature measurements to discover the source of the discrepancy. Updates to TIRS calibration coefficients will be incorporated into Landsat 8 data processing as soon as the discrepancy is sufficiently understood. This presentation will report the current performance of Landsat 8 and will discuss the impact of the performance on Landsat data analyses and applications.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013AGUFM.B53G..02I
- Keywords:
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- 0480 BIOGEOSCIENCES Remote sensing;
- 0434 BIOGEOSCIENCES Data sets;
- 0452 BIOGEOSCIENCES Instruments and techniques