Publications

Angal, A; Xiong, XX; Shrestha, A (2020). Cross-Calibration of MODIS Reflective Solar Bands With Sentinel 2A/2B MSI Instruments. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, 58(7), 5000-5007.

Abstract
Moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) is a 36-band spectroradiometer that measures the Earth's surface from 0.4 to 14.4 mu m at three spatial resolutions, 250 m (two bands), 500 m (five bands), and 1000 m (29 bands). The wide-scale use of the science products derived from the two MODIS instruments on the Terra and Aqua spacecrafts is a result of their excellent on-orbit performance, calibration stability, and accuracy through the life of the mission, making them a benchmark against which the performance of newer instruments is frequently evaluated. The recently launched multispectral instrument (MSI) aboard the Sentinel 2A and Sentinel 2B spacecrafts are part of the European Union's Copernicus program designed to acquire high spatial resolution imagery in the reflective spectrum from 0.4 to 2.2 mu m . One of the popular techniques to evaluate the on-orbit calibration is by comparing the top-of-atmosphere (TOA) reflectance with an independent (well-calibrated) sensor while viewing a pseudoinvariant desert target, such as Libya 4. In this work, the TOA reflectances from Terra and Aqua MODIS and Sentinel 2A and Sentinel 2B MSI are compared using the same-day scenes from Libya 4. The corrections for spectral response function mismatch and the bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) are formulated and applied to obtain an effective TOA reflectance difference between the spectrally matching bands of these sensors. The availability of off-nadir MODIS overpass pairs with MSI facilitates the comparison across the entire MODIS scan-angle range and in turn an on-orbit evaluation of the response versus scan-angle (RVS) corrections is performed. Additionally, each MODIS instrument is used as a transfer mechanism to evaluate the calibration differences between the two MSIs, with an agreement to within 1% observed between the two MSIs. The radiometric calibration differences between Terra MODIS and the two MSIs at nadir is generally within 4%, with only the red-band pair (Terra MODIS band 1 and MSI band 4) showing disagreement beyond 4%. In general, the reflectance ratios are in better agreement with Aqua MODIS than with Terra MODIS. A better agreement between MODIS and the two MSIs is observed at nadir, indicating some residual effects associated with the BRDF correction that are observed in the off-nadir scene pairs. Also included in this article is a description of the various uncertainties associated with this cross-calibration.

DOI:
10.1109/TGRS.2020.2971462

ISSN:
0196-2892