ECCOE Landsat quarterly Calibration and Validation report—Quarter 1, 2023

Executive Summary

The U.S. Geological Survey Earth Resources Observation and Science Calibration and Validation (Cal/Val) Center of Excellence (ECCOE) focuses on improving the accuracy, precision, calibration, and product quality of remote-sensing data, leveraging years of multiscale optical system geometric and radiometric calibration and characterization experience. The ECCOE Landsat Cal/Val Team continually monitors the geometric and radiometric performance of active Landsat missions and makes calibration adjustments, as needed, to maintain data quality at the highest level.

This report provides observed geometric and radiometric analysis results for Landsats 7–8 for quarter 1 (January–March) of 2023. All data used to compile the Cal/Val analysis results presented in this report are freely available from the U.S. Geological Survey EarthExplorer website: https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov.

One specific activity that the ECCOE Landsat Cal/Val Team closely monitored was a Landsat 8 safehold anomaly. On January 26, 2023, the Global Positioning System (GPS) onboard Landsat 8 became invalid because the GPS fault tripped. Later that same day, the GPS was reinitialized, but a Field of View 1 fault trip occurred early the next morning, causing the observatory to go into Earth Point Safe mode, which put the Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) into safehold. Once it was safe to reactivate the sensors, the OLI was transitioned to operational status late on January 27 and TIRS was reactivated early on January 28. Additional information about the Landsat 8 safehold anomaly is here: https://www.usgs.gov/landsat-missions/news/landsat-8-recovers-safehold.