Potential of Red Edge Spectral Bands in Future Landsat Satellites on Agroecosystem Canopy Chlorophyll Content Retrieval

Vegetation biophysical parameter retrieval is an important earth remote sensing system application. In this paper, we studied the potential impact of the addition of new spectral bands in the red edge region in future Landsat satellites on agroecosystem canopy chlorophyll content (CCC) retrieval. The test data were simulated from SPARC `03 field campaign HyMap hyperspectral data. Two retrieval approaches were tested: empirical regression based on vegetation index (VI) and physical model-based look-up-table (LUT) inversion. The results of both approaches showed that a potential new spectral band located between the Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) red and NIR bands slightly improved the agroecosystem CCC retrieval accuracy (R
²
of 0.853 vs. 0.875 for vegetation index approach, 0.500 vs. 0.570 for LUT inversion approach).