Dr. Eric Vermote, Principal Investigator and Dr. Christopher Justice, Co-Principal Investigator have received a United States Geological Survey award “A surface reflectance standard product from LDCM and supporting activities” in the amount of $100,000 per year for up to 5 years. The Surface Reflectance standard product developed for MODIS provides the basis for a number of higher order land products for global change and applications research. Unfortunately, there was no equivalent suite of standard geophysical products provided for Landsat 7 beyond Level 1b. This has placed the burden of standard processing of Landsat data on the user community. In the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) era of large volume, regional to global data Landsat processing and operational use of the data, there is an urgent need for product standardization. This project will build on the co-investigators’ MODIS and Landsat experience, and will provide a standard surface reflectance product for LDCM. Their current research approach on Landsat, carried out as part of the NASA LEDAPS project for North America, will be tested globally. Prior to the launch of LDCM the project will apply the approach to the Mid Decadal Global Land Survey Data (Phase 2), with the aim of extending data product continuity. The experience of the team with AVHRR and MODIS vicarious calibration will be applied to LDCM and close attention will be given to pre and post-launch instrument testing and performance.

The Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) Long-Term Acquisition Plan (LTAP):
Extending and Enhancing the Landsat 7 LTAP Approach
Dr Samuel N. Goward and co- investigator Dr. Darrel Williams, NASA/GSFC, have been selected to serve on the USGS Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM, aka Landsat 8) Science Team. They have received a five year, $100,000 per year, award under the title The Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) Long-Term Acquisition Plan (LTAP): Extending and enhancing the Landsat 7 LTAP approach. Their proposed LDCM science team activity will be based on the experiences Drs. Goward and Williams gained over the last decade in developing and validating the Landsat-7 (L7) LTAP. There are many Landsat users even today—after nearly 36 years of operations—who believe that the Landsat systems acquire data continuously while in orbit. This has never been the case. Given instrument, spacecraft and ground systems constraints, continuous operations have neither been possible nor desirable. A continuously operating Landsat-7 system would generate truly large volumes of data, much of which would not be useful to land analysis because of clouds, oceans and/or a lack of sunlight. The new project will build upon the prior L7 LTAP effort, where the LTAP team combined and queried various data sets available in the mid to late 1990s, such as the NOAA AVHRR vegetation index record, International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) files, and NOAA National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) cloud forecasts, within the Oracle-based Landsat 7 scheduler computing facilities in the L7 Mission Operations Center at NASA/GSFC.