An Increased Potential for the Landsat Data Continuity Mission to Contribute to Water Quality Studies for Inland, Case 2 Waters

The Landsat Data Continuity Mission´s (LDCM) Operational Land Imager (OLI) is a new sensor being developed by NASA which is both radiometrically and spatially sufficient for the monitoring of case 2 waters. This study, based on the sensor´s design, presents the initial results of an experiment to determine what impact its improved features will have on water quality assessment. Specifically, we investigate how the addition of a deep blue band, 12-bit quantization, and improved signal-to-noise ratios affects our ability to retrieve water constituents. Preliminary tests are performed in the absence of atmospheric effects and indicate that the LDCM sensor can achieve about 5% error in the retrieval process while its predecessor ETM+ produces errors of over 20%. These results illustrate LDCM´s potential to be a useful tool for the continuous monitoring of coastal and inland water resources. Ongoing work is focused on atmospherically compensating the data from the OLI instrument to actually achieve the potential demonstrated in this study.