How Do You Landsat Overfly

An optimal opportunity for in-flight cross-calibration occurred when Landsat 9 flew underneath Landsat 8 while moving into its final orbit. Since the two satellites nearly identical imaging systems, the underfly event offered ideal cross-calibration conditions.

Three types of uncertainty were considered: geometric, spectral, and angular. Differences caused by geometric uncertainty were found to be negligible for this application. Spectral uncertainty was found to be minimal except for the green band when viewing vegetative targets. With these three contributions of uncertainty properly addressed, it was estimated that the total cross-calibration uncertainty for underfly data could be kept under 1%.

Initial results of this approach indicated the cross-calibration may be as accurate as 0.5% in reflectance space and 1.0% in radiance space. The initial results developed in this study were used to refine the cross-calibration of Landsat 9 to Landsat 8 at the end of the OIV period.

Read the Research here: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/14/10/2418