Chapter 10. The Calibration and Characterization of Earth Remote Sensing and Environmental Monitoring Instruments

摘要

The ability to monitor, understand, and predict short and long term climate and environmental processes is fundamentally related to the quality of the data produced by the remote sensing instruments used to measure those processes. Key to the production of high quality remote sensing data are the careful calibration and characterization of the remote sensing instruments both pre-launch and on-orbit. Calibration can be defined as the process of quantitatively defining an instrument's system response to known, controlled inputs. Characterization can be defined as the set of operations or processes used to quantitatively understand the operation of an instrument. Chapter 10 titled 'The Calibration and Characterization of Earth Remote Sensing and Environmental Monitoring Instruments,' in the book, The Practice of Optical Radiometry describes current, established approaches in the pre-launch and on-orbit radiometric calibration and spectral characterization of fundamental measurements made by Earth remote sensing and environmental monitoring instruments. Brief descriptions of innovative and state of the art approaches to calibration and characterization are also provided. The examples are confined to optical measurements made in the air ultraviolet through thermal infrared wavelength regions from 190 nm to 100 micro m. The chapter concludes by identifying a number of challenging areas in the Earth remote sensing field.