The combination of internal calibrator data 14 times per second, pinhole sun images every day and panel measurements every month along with ground based calibration campaigns roughly quarterly, provides an integrated strategy for characterizing instrument performance on multiple time scales. Within the IAS, processing capabilities include radiometric artifact characterization and correction, radiometric calibration from the multiple calibrator sources, including the ground based calibration and statistical trending of calibration data to improve calibration estimation.
Radiometric artifacts are systematic noises in the instrument, that once understood, can be removed.
On previous Landsat-5 TM's these artifacts included patterned or coherent noise, random changes in the bias or background levels of the detectors and hysteresis, where the detectors current output is affected by the brightness of targets it has previously seen. This calibration information will also be supplied to ground processing systems throughout the world. To Properly Show Changes In Tropical Forest. Changes in the forest coverage with time are of critical importance in the study of global change because the loss of forest increases atmospheric carbon dioxide. For Brazil these changes have been documented by examining regular sequences of Landsat or SPOT images.