An Atmospheric Correction Parameter Calculator for a single thermal band earth-sensing instrument

An atmospheric correction tool has been developed for public web site access for the Landsat-5 and Landsat-7 thermal band. The Atmospheric Correction Parameter Calculator uses the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) modeled atmospheric global profiles for a particular date, time and location as input. Using commercially-available MODTRAN software and a suite of integration algorithms, the site-specific atmospheric transmission, and upwelling and downwelling radiances are derived. These calculated parameters can be applied to single band thermal imagery from Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper (TM) or Landsat-7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) to infer an at-surface kinetic temperature for all the pixels in the scene. Given the TM and ETM+ Band-6 instrument calibration uncertainties in Top-of-Atmosphere temperature are ±1.0 and ±0.6 K, respectively, then the corresponding uncertainties in the inferred surface temperatures are approximately ±2-3 K.