Landsat-8 Calibration

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Thomas Nauss

2024-02-10

The following example shows how to read a Landsat-8 data set downloaded from the USGS Earth Explorer and how to convert the bands’ scaled counts to radiance, reflectance and/or brightness temperature.

Reading Landsat-8 data

We will use the test data set supplied with this package. In order to read the data set, just supply the filename (or list of filenames) to the satellite() function.

library(satellite)

## Loading required package: raster

## Loading required package: sp

path <- system.file("extdata", package = "satellite")
files <- list.files(path, pattern = glob2rx("LC08*.TIF"), full.names = TRUE)
sat <- satellite(files)

The meta data will automatically be loaded since (i) Landsat-8 is a known platform to the satellite package and (ii) the name of the meta data file is in accordance with the USGS conventions.

Converting Landsat-8 scaled counts to physical units

In order to convert scaled counts of a Satellite object to radiance, reflectance and/or temperature, just supply it to the convSC2Rad, convSC2Ref or convRad2BT function.

sat <- convSC2Rad(sat)
sat <- convSC2Ref(sat)
sat <- convRad2BT(sat)

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.