Calibration/Validation of Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometers and Applications.

In a new era of global awareness and globalization, what's happening around the world in real-time such as hurricanes, volcanic eruption, fires, drought, pollution, and other environmental and climate challenges are becoming increasingly more important and affect people's lives. To meet these challenges, Earth observations from a new generation of satellites have now become available giving us unprecedented capabilities to monitor and study our planet. With global coverage twice daily for the next several decades, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometers on polar orbiting satellites provide rich and publically available data sets for a large number of land, atmosphere, and ocean applications, including the monitoring of aerosols, cloud properties, radiation budget, sea surface temperature, ocean color, active fire, albedo, snow and ice, vegetation, land use/land cover, night-lights from human activities, and natural disasters. Calibration and validation of these satellite observations are essential to ensure the quality, accuracy, precision, and stability of the data for the applications. This book will review recent advances in satellite optical sensor calibration and validation methodologies, algorithms, and techniques. Example calibration and validation of environmental data products are also discussed. It aims to serve all professionals, researchers, students, scientists alike in academics, industries, government, and beyond.

Comprehensive Remote Sensing, Nine Volume Set covers all aspects of the topic, with each volume edited by well-known scientists and contributed to by frontier researchers. It is a comprehensive resource that will benefit both students and researchers who want to further their understanding in this discipline. The field of remote sensing has quadrupled in size in the past two decades, and increasingly draws in individuals working in a diverse set of disciplines ranging from geographers, oceanographers, and meteorologists, to physicists and computer scientists. Researchers from a variety of backgrounds are now accessing remote sensing data, creating an urgent need for a one-stop reference work that can comprehensively document the development of remote sensing, from the basic principles, modeling and practical algorithms, to various applications. Fully comprehensive coverage of this rapidly growing discipline, giving readers a detailed overview of all aspects of Remote Sensing principles and applications Contains ‘Layered content’, with each article beginning with the basics and then moving on to more complex concepts Ideal for advanced undergraduates and academic researchers Includes case studies that illustrate the practical application of remote sensing principles, further enhancing understanding

Los Alamos National Laboratory is currently constructing a calibration laboratory to support the radiometric calibration of remote earth sensing instrumentation. This laboratory will consist of a calibration station contained within a vacuum chamber whose output interface plane will provide a radiometrically characterized collimated optical beam of 16in. diameter. This output beam is fed to a thermal vacuum chamber where sensors under test are to be housed. The station will contain reference sources suitable for calibration of detectors from the visible and near infrared (VIS/NIR) to the thermal infrared. Design goals for these sources include absolute radiometric accuracies of better than 1% (3[sigma]) for the thermal infrared up to 14 [mu]m and VIS/NIR wavelengths up to 0.9 [mu]m. For wavelengths between 0.9 [mu]m and 2.5 [mu]m, absolute accuracies of better than 3% are anticipated. Significant additional features of the calibration station design include: NIST support in the design and calibration of the radiometric sources, spectral characterization of the blackbody references, implementation of a vacuum compatible whitebody (integrating sphere) source, infrared resolution targets of variable contrast, and use of a scan mirror to duplicate target velocity vectors. This paper will provide an overview, description of the intended calibration station capability with further details provided in a companion paper also contained in these proceedings.

This book describes the algorithms, validation and preliminary analysis of the Global LAnd Surface Satellite (GLASS) products, a long-term, high-quality dataset that is now freely available worldwide to government organizations and agencies, scientific research institutions, students and members of the general public. The GLASS products include leaf area index, broadband albedo, broadband emissivity, downward shortwave radiation and photosynthetically active radiation. The first three GLASS products cover 1981 to 2012 with 1km and 5km spatial resolutions and 8-day temporal resolution, and the last two GLASS products span 2008 to 2010 with 3-hour temporal resolution and 5km spatial resolution. These GLASS products are unique. The first three are spatially continuous and cover the longest period of time among all current similar satellite products. The other two products are the highest spatial-resolution global radiation products from satellite observations that are currently available. These products can be downloaded from Beijing Normal University at http://glass-product.bnu.edu.cn/ and the University of Maryland Global Land Cover Facility at http://www.glcf.umd.edu/ The GLASS products are the outcome of a key research project entitled “Generation & Applications of Global Products of Essential Land Variables”, supported by funding from the High-Tech Research and Development Program of China and involving dozens of institutions and nearly one hundred scientists and researchers. Following an introduction, the book contains five chapters corresponding to these five GLASS products: background, algorithm, quality control and validation, preliminary analysis and applications. It discusses the long-term environmental changes detected from the GLASS products and other data sources at both global and local scales and also provides detailed analysis of regional hotspots where environmental changes are mainly associated with climate change, drought, land-atmosphere interactions, and human activities. The book is based primarily on a set of published journal papers about these five GLASS products and includes updated information. Since these products have now begun to be widely used, this book is an essential reference document. It is also a very helpful resource to anyone interested in satellite remote sensing and its applications.

Satellite images acquired at night provide a visually arresting perspective of the Earth and the human activities that light up the otherwise mostly dark Earth. These night-time light satellite images can be compiled into a geospatial time series that represent an invaluable source of information for both the natural and social sciences. Night-time light remote sensing has been shown to be particularly useful for a range of natural science and social science applications, including studies relating to urban development, demography, sociology, fishing activity, light pollution and the consequences of civil war. Key sensors for these time-series include the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program’s Operational Linescan System (DMSP/OLS) and the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership Satellite’s Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite Day/Night Band (Suomi NPP/VIIRS DNB). An increasing number of alternative sources are also available, including high spatial resolution and multispectral sensors. This book captures key methodological issues associated with pre-processing night-time light data, documents state of the art analysis methods, and explores a wide range of applications. Major sections focus on NPP/VIIRS DNB processing; inter-calibration between NPP/VIIRS and DMPS/OLS; applications associated with socio-economic activities, applications in monitoring urbanization; and fishing activity monitoring. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Remote Sensing.