A reflectance based vicarious calibration with on-site instruments monitoring Original Research Article

A method of vicarious calibration for visible to short wave infrared wavelength region of mission instruments onboard satellites based on the reflectance based method is proposed. The method intends to improve vicarious calibration accuracy utilizing spectral radiometer which allows to measure the down-welling radiance at the surface with a certain calibration accuracy by using a portable calibration source. Meantime, the stability of the spectral radiometer for surface reflectance and BRDF measurement is also improved by using the portable calibration source results in improvement of surface reflectance measurement. Through an error budget analysis, it is found that the calibration accuracy of the proposed method is around 3.16 % which is 9.7 % better accuracy than the traditional method, the reflectance based method without any calibration of the ground measuring instruments.