A one-year radiometric evaluation of the Advanced Land Imager (ALI)

The work presented in this thesis is part of the work done under the New Millennium Project. The Earth Observer ONE (EO1) mission the focus of the work presented, aimed to provide better understanding of the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) radiometric performance and stability. Analysis of the instrument over a year of operation revealed generally good bias stability except for Bands 5p, 5 and 7. Furthermore, short-term (within one scene) bias stability has been inspected. This analysis has been conducted on extended length scenes termed “long collects”. Good short-term stability was observed for all the ALI detectors except for a few detectors in SCA1. A de-striping algorithm named “relative gain calibration” was proposed. This algorithm attempted to equalize ALI detector gains, at the SCA/band level, utilizing scene statistics only. Therefore, it is different from many de-striping techniques in that it does not require any pre-launch measurements. This algorithm is capable of providing results as good as standard techniques in several spectral bands.