VICARIOUS RADIOMETRIC CALIBRATION USING A GROUND RADIANCE-BASED APPROACH: A CASE STUDY OF SENTINEL 2A MSI

Radiometric characteristics monitoring of optical remote sensing data is a very essential step that enables further quantitative study and application of the data. In this paper, long term vicarious radiometric calibration using ground reflected radiance-based approach was introduced in this study. A case study of Sentinel 2A multispectral imager (MSI) vicarious radiometric characteristics monitoring based on our proposed approach with an automatic observation system was conducted over a large scale desert at the Baotou calibration site in Inner Mongolia, China. And, twelve clear Sentinel 2A MSI scenes as well as ground measurements were successfully acquired during the year of 2017. Top of Atmospheric (TOA) radiance and reflectance were predicted with introduced approach from ground reflected radiance and atmospheric data. The long term radiometric calibration results suggests that the Sentinel 2A MSI display a stable radiometric performance over the calibration period. Vicarious and onboard radiometric calibration results were also cross compared with average relative error about 5%. Uncertainty analysis also show that the TOA radiance overall uncertainty is less than 3.5% due to the atmospheric characteristics, surface characteristics, and the calibration model uncertainties sources.