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South Dakota State University

Band to Band Calibration and Relative Gain Analysis of Satellite Sensors Using Deep Convective Clouds

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

<p>Two calibration techniques were developed in this research. First, a calibration technique, in which calibration was transferred to cirrus band and coastal aerosol band from well calibrated reflective bands of Landsat 8 using SCIAMACHY Deep Convective Cloud (DCC) spectra. Second, a novel method to derive relative gains using DCCs and improve the image quality of cirrus band scenes was developed. DCCs are very cold, bright clouds located in the tropopause layer. At small sun elevation and sensor viewing angles, they act as near Lambertian solar reflectors. They have very high signal to noise ratio and can easily be detected using simple IR threshold. Thus, DCCs are an ideal calibration target. Cirrus band in Landsat 8 has band center at 1375nm. Due to high water vapor absorption at this wavelength it is difficult to calibrate the cirrus band using other standard vicarious calibration methods. Similarly, the coastal aerosol band has short wavelength (443nm). At this wavelength maximum scattering can be observed in the atmosphere, due to which it is difficult to calibrate this band. Thus DCCs are investigated to calibrate these two channels. DCC spectra measured by the SCIAMACHY hyperspectral sensor were used to transfer calibration. The gain estimates after band to band calibration using DCC for the coastal aerosol band was 0.986 ±0.0031 and that for cirrus band was 0.982±0.0398. The primarily target was to estimate gains with uncertainty of less than 5%. The results are within required precision levels and the primarily goal of the research was successfully accomplished. The non-uniformity in detector response can cause visible streaks in the image. To remove these visible streaks, modified histogram equalization method was used in the second algorithm. A large number of DCC scenes were binned and relative gains were derived. Results were validated qualitatively by visual analysis and quantitatively by the streaking metric. The streaking metric was below 0.2 for most of the detector which was the required goal. Visible streaks were removed by applying DCC derived gains and in most of the cases DCC gains outperforms the default gains.</p>

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Master of Science (MS)
Level thesis:degree_level
Thesis - Open Access
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Year dc:date.available
2015

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Bhatta, Suman
Contributors dc:contributor
  • Dennis Helder

Subjects

dc:subject × 1

Rights

dc:rights
Language dc:language
en

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Repository record dc:identifier
https://openprairie.sdstate.edu/etd/1233
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:openprairie.sdstate.edu:etd-2234

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
South Dakota State University
Base URL
openprairie.sdstate.edu/do/oai/
Last updated
2026-07-24
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Bhatta, Suman. Band to Band Calibration and Relative Gain Analysis of Satellite Sensors Using Deep Convective Clouds. Thesis - Open Access thesis, 2015. https://openprairie.sdstate.edu/etd/1233