Radiometric Cross-Calibration of the ZY1-02D Hyperspectral Imager Using the GF-5 AHSI Imager

The ZY1-02D satellite, which was launched in 2019, is China’s first civil hyperspectral satellite. However, the laboratory calibration and vicarious calibration methods could not provide accurate radiometric calibration coefficients after the satellite had been launched. In this article, we describe how a cross-calibration method was utilized to calibrate the ZY1-02D hyperspectral imager using the well-calibrated Gaofen-5 Advanced Hyperspectral Imager (GF-5 AHSI). The 6S radiative transfer model was selected to simulate the apparent reflectance of the two hyperspectral sensors under corresponding imaging conditions, and the calibration coefficients were calculated by spectral channel matching. The reflectance-based vicarious calibration was carried out for comparison. Through the validation experiments, it is shown that the reflectance data obtained by cross-calibration and vicarious calibration are basically consistent, showing a stable radiation performance. At the Dunhuang calibration site, the ratio of measured surface reflectance to the cross-calibrated image reflectance is between 0.9 and 1.1, the
$R^{2}$
values are more than 0.96, and the spectral angles are less than 3°. The validation results for different ground features also show the applicability of the corrected coefficients. When compared with different sensors, the maximum difference between the ZY1-02D reflectance results after cross-calibration and Landsat-8/Sentinel-2 is less than 0.04 and the mean difference is less than 0.02, which further proves that the ZY1-02D hyperspectral imager has a high radiation accuracy after cross-calibration. The proposed cross-calibration method could be used as an effective supplement to the on-orbit calibration method and could also be extended to other satellite hyperspectral imagers.