Preliminary analysis of the performance of the Landsat 8/OLI land surface reflectance product

This paper presents the Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) atmospheric correction algorithm that has been developed using the Second Simulation of the Satellite Signal in the Solar Spectrum Vectorial (6SV) model, refined to take advantage of the narrow OLI spectral bands (compared to Thematic Mapper/Enhanced Thematic Mapper (TM/ETM +)), improved radiometric resolution and signal-to-noise. In addition, the algorithm uses the new OLI Coastal aerosol band (0.433-0.450 μm), which is particularly helpful for retrieving aerosol properties, as it covers shorter wavelengths than the conventional Landsat, TM and ETM + blue bands. A cloud and cloud shadow mask has also been developed using the “cirrus” band (1.360-1.390 μm) available on OLI, and the thermal infrared bands from the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) instrument. The performance of the surface reflectance product from OLI is analyzed over the Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) sites using accurate atmospheric correction (based on in situ measurements of the atmospheric properties), by comparison with the MODIS Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) adjusted surface reflectance product and by comparison of OLI derived broadband albedo from United States Surface Radiation Budget Network (US SURFRAD) measurements. The results presented clearly show an improvement of Landsat 8 surface reflectance product over the ad-hoc Landsat 5/7 LEDAPS product.