The Landsat 8 spacecraft was launched on 11 February 2013 carrying two imaging payloads: the Operational Land Imager (OLI) and the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS). The TIRS instrument employs a refractive telescope design that is opaque to visible wavelengths making prelaunch geometric characterization challenging. TIRS geometric calibration thus relied heavily on on-orbit measurements. Since th...

To conduct precision geometric correction of Landsat-8 data, all ground control points from the Global Land Survey (GLS) 2005 are typically selected, thereby making the process time consuming and labor intensive. This paper developed an optimal selection algorithm for choosing representative points. The optimal technique consists of three steps, including 1) evaluating the spatial distribution ...

The constellation of Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 optical satellites offers opportunities for a wide range of Earth Observation (EO) applications and scientific studies in Earth sciences mainly related to geohazards. The multi-temporal co-registration accuracy of images provided by both missions is, however, currently not fully satisfactory for change detection, time-series analysis and in particul...

Conventional methods for Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) retrieval are limited to areas with low reflectance such as water or vegetated areas because the satellite signals from the aerosols in these areas are more obvious than those in areas with higher reflectance such as urban and sandy areas. Land Surface Reflectance (LSR) is the key parameter that must be estimated accurately. Most current meth...

A study was conducted to understand the potential of Landsat-8 in the estimation of gross primary production (GPP) and to quantify the productivity of maize crop cultivated under hyper-arid conditions of Saudi Arabia. The GPP of maize crop was estimated by using the Vegetation Photosynthesis Model (VPM) utilizing remote sensing data from Landsat-8 reflectance (GPPVPM) as well as the meteorologi...

Combination of different satellite data will provide increased opportunities for more frequent cloud-free surface observations due to variable cloud cover at the different satellite overpass times and dates. Satellite data from the polar-orbiting Landsat-8 (launched 2013), Sentinel-2A (launched 2015) and Sentinel-2B (launched 2017) sensors offer 10 m to 30 m multi-spectral global coverage. Toge...

.................................................................................................................... iv Introduction ................................................................................................................. 1 Background and Study Area ....................................................................................... 2 Methods ...........................

Spatiotemporal quantification of surface water and flooding is essential given that floods are among the largest natural hazards. Effective disaster response management requires near real-time information on flood extent. Satellite remote sensing only way monitoring these dynamics across vast areas over time. Previous mapping efforts have relied optical time series, despite cloud contamination....