%0 Journal Article
%T The Application of Deep Convective Clouds in the Calibration and Response Monitoring of the Reflective Solar Bands of FY-3A/MERSI (Medium Resolution Spectral Imager)
%A Lin Chen
%A Xiuqing Hu
%A Na Xu
%A Peng Zhang
%J Remote Sensing
%D 2013
%I MDPI AG
%R 10.3390/rs5126958
%X Based on simulated reflectance, deep convective clouds (DCC) can be used as an invariant target to monitor the radiometric response degradation of the FY-3A/MERSI (Medium Resolution Spectral Imager) reflective solar bands (RSBs). The long-term response of the MERSI RSBs can easily be predicted using a quadratic fit of the monthly DCC mean reflectance, except for bands 6 and 7, which suffer from instrument anomalies. DCC-based degradations show that the blue bands (¦Ë < 500 nm) and water-vapor bands have degraded significantly, whereas for near-infrared bands, the total degradations in four years are within 3% (excluding bands 3 and 20). For most bands, the degradation rates are greatest during the first year in orbit and decrease over time. The FY-3A/MERSI degradation results derived from DCC are consistent within 2.5%, except for bands, 11, 18 and 19, when compared with Aqua/MODIS(Moderate Resolution Imaging Sepetroradiometer) inter-calibration, multi-site invariant earth target calibration and the CRCS(Chinese Radiometric Calibration Site) Dunhuang desert vicarious calibration methods. Overall, the 2¦Ò/mean degradation uncertainty for most MERSI bands was within 3%, validating the temporal stability of the DCC monthly mean reflectances. The DCC method has reduced the degradation uncertainties for MERSI water vapor bands over other methods. This is a significant advantage of the DCC calibration method. The saturation of some MERSI bands may hinder the effectiveness of the DCC calibration approach.
%K deep convective cloud
%K radiometric calibration
%K response degradation
%K MERSI
%K reflective solar bands
%U http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/5/12/6958