Bi-Directional Reflectance Factor Determination of the Railroad Valley Playa

Vicarious calibration is the determination of an on-orbit sensor's radiometric response using measurements over test sites such as Railroad Valley (RRV), Nevada. It has the highest accuracy when a remote sensor's view angle is aligned with that of the surface measurements, namely at a nadir view. For view angles greater than 10 degrees, the dominant error is the uncertainty in the off-nadir correction factor. The factor is largest in the back-scatter principal plane and can reach 20%. The Orbiting-Carbon Observatory has access to a number of datasets to determine this deviation. These include measurements from field instruments such as the Portable Apparatus for Rapid Acquisition of Bidirectional Observation of the Land and Atmosphere (PARABOLA), as well as satellite measurements from Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) and MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). The correction factor derived from PARABOLA is consistent in time and space to within 2% for view angles as large as 30 degrees. Field spectrometer data show that the correction term is spectrally invariant. For this reason, a time-invariant model of RRV surface reflectance, along with empirically derived coefficients, is sufficient to use in the calibration of off-nadir sensors, provided there has been no recent rainfall. With this off-nadir correction, calibrations can be expected to have uncertainties within 5%.