Vicarious Calibration of Landsat-8 Thermal Data Collections and its Influence on Split-Window Algorithm Validation

Abstract

Landsat 8 (L8) satellite was launched on February 11, 2013 with two thermal bands located in the atmospheric window between 10-12 μm. Continuous monitoring of the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) onboard of L8 was performed over two Spanish test sites - Barrax and Doñana - in order to contribute to the quality of TIRS data. In this work, a Vicarious Calibration (VC) of the TIRS bands was performed between years 2013-2016 in order to assess the new Stray Light (SL) data correction. The results of VC show us that band 10 and 11 provide accurate results (bias near to zero, and precision around 0.8 K) which is an improvement - especially for band 11 - in comparison to preprocessed SL data. This little better performance has direct influence on Split Window (SW) algorithm, lowering its standard deviation into 0.3 K, as is shown in this work.