On-Orbit Measurement of the Effective Focal Length and Band-to-Band Registration of Satellite-Borne Whiskbroom Imaging Sensors

We have developed an approach for the measurement of the effective focal length (EFL) and band-to-band registration (BBR) of selected spectral bands of satellite-borne whiskbroom imaging sensors from on-orbit data. Our approach is based on simulating the coarser spatial resolution whiskbroom sensor data with finer spatial resolution Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus or Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager data using the geolocation (Earth location) information from each sensor and computing the correlation between the simulated and original data. For each scan of a selected spectral band of the whiskbroom dataset, various subsets of the data are examined to find the subset with the highest spatial correlation between the original and simulated data using the nominal geolocation information. Then, for this best subset, the focal length value and the spatial shift are varied to find the values that produce the highest spatial correlation between the original and simulated data. This best focal length value is taken to be the measured instrument EFL, and the best spatial shift is taken to be the registration of the whiskbroom data relative to the Landsat data, from which the BBR is inferred. Best results are obtained with cloud-free subsets with contrasting land features. This measurement is repeated over other scans with cloud-free subsets. We demonstrate our approach with on-orbit data from the Aqua and Terra MODIS instruments and SNPP and J1 VIIRS instruments.