Cross-calibration of the reflective solar bands of Terra MODIS and Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper plus over PICS using different approaches

Both Terra MODIS and Landsat 7 (L7) Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) have been successfully operating for over 15 years to collect valuable measurements of the earth’s land, ocean, and atmosphere. The land-viewing bands of both sensors are widely used in several scientific products such as surface reflectance, normalized difference vegetation index, enhanced vegetation index etc. A synergistic use of the multi-temporal measurements from both sensors can greatly benefit the science community. Previous effort from the MODIS Characterization Support Team (MCST) was focused on comparing the top-of-atmosphere reflectance of the two sensors over Libya 4 desert target. Uncertainties caused by the site/atmospheric BRDF, spectral response mismatch, and atmospheric water-vapor were also characterized. In parallel, an absolute calibration approach based on empirical observation was also developed for the Libya 4 site by the South Dakota State University’s (SDSU) Image Processing Lab. Observations from Terra MODIS and Earth Observing One (EO-1) Hyperion were used to model the Landsat ETM+ TOA reflectance. Recently, there has been an update to the MODIS calibration algorithm, which has resulted in the newly reprocessed Collection 6 Level 1B calibrated products. Similarly, a calibration update to some ETM+ bands has also resulted in long-term improvements of its calibration accuracy. With these updates, calibration differences between the spectrally matching bands of Terra MODIS and L7 ETM+ over the Libya 4 site are evaluated using both approaches.