"Evaluation of Automated Radiative Transfer Modelling in an Operational Environment on Poorly Calibrated Medium Resolution Satellite Imagery"

Landsat TM has provided a continuous stream of data over several decades at a moderate resolution suitable to extract land based information. Landsat 5 TM being in orbit for almost 25 years, far exceeding design expectations has degraded significantly in its spectral properties. Although new methods for the determination of calibration parameters have been published several years ago (Chander & Markham 2003), these have not been implemented in low end product generation systems used by ground receiving stations in the third world. Resulting imagery from such systems is thus unsuitable as input for standard atmospheric correction processing chains. This is particularly tragic as it is the poorer countries that can reap the highest benefit from TM imagery, and most data resides at local ground receiving stations and therefore can not be processed and ordered trough the USGS.