An Automatic Radiometric Cross-Calibration Method for Wide-Angle Medium-Resolution Multispectral Satellite Sensor Using Landsat Data

Radiometric calibration of the medium-resolution satellite data is critical for monitoring and quantifying changes in the Earth’s environment and resources. Many medium-resolution satellite sensors have irregular revisits and, sometimes, have a large difference in illumination viewing geometry compared with a reference sensor, posing a great challenge for routine cross-calibration practices. To overcome these issues, this study proposed a cross-calibration method to calibrate medium-resolution multispectral data. The Chinese Gaofen-4 (GF-4) panchromatic and multispectral sensor (PMS) data with large viewing angles were used as the test data, and Landsat-8 operational land imager (OLI) data were used as the reference data. A bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) correction method was proposed to eliminate the effects of differences in illumination viewing geometry between GF-4 and Landsat-8. The validation using concurrent image shows that the mean relative error (MRE) of cross calibration is less than 6.65%. Validation using ground measurements shows that our calibration results have an improvement of around 14.8% compared with the official released calibration coefficients. The time series cross calibration reveals that, without the requirements of simultaneous nadir observations (SNOs), our calibration activities can be carried out more often in practice. Gradual and continuous radiometric sensor degradation is identified with the monthly updated calibration coefficients, demonstrating the reliability and importance of the timely cross calibration. Besides, the cross-calibration approach does not rely on any specific calibration site, and the difference in illumination viewing geometry can be well considered. Thus, it can be easily adapted and applied to other optical satellite data.