OBJECTIVES

The next decades foresee an ever-increasing demand for Earth Observation (EO) data to meet the demanding needs of climate science and operational monitoring of the planet, across land, ocean and atmospheric domains. These demands will be met by a combination of traditional civil space agency missions and commercial / institutional low-cost micro/nanosatellites, spanning the electromagnetic spectrum. The rapid emergence of space-based Greenhouse Gas monitoring missions and hyperspectral imagers and their application to the ’net zero’ agenda has further grown the EO landscape in the optical domain.

Pre-flight calibration and characterisation of satellite instruments is a firmly established pre-requisite for any Earth observation mission. However, the scale of effort, degree of completeness and complexity vary with application and exact nature of the satellite instrument. This workshop will review and assess requirements against current and future application needs and consider innovations in the state-of-the-art in calibration and characterisation methods and facilities. It will seek to bring together heritage learnings of past campaigns, their impact in flight operations and recommendations for evolutionary instruments of the future. The workshop will encourage industry and calibration and characterisation facility developers to present new and emerging solutions conceived to meet the exacting and challenging needs of future climate missions.

This first, of an intended series of workshops will concentrate on passive optical instruments (multi/hyper-spectral and spectrometers), primarily those operating in the solar reflective spectral range from the UV-SWIR (~250 to 2500 nm) with an additional extension day dedicated to the thermal infrared (TIR). The follow-on day recognises the significant number of relatively high spatial resolution TIR satellite imagers under development within space agencies and the commercial sector at this time.

The workshop seeks to bring together, experts from industrial and academic developers of instruments, those specifying, designing and performing calibration and characterisation as well as scientists, engineers, agencies and funding organisations interested in: what is and/or might be possible for a next generation instrument or future application. The workshop will be organised to encourage discussion on what is ‘fit for purpose’ for particular types of application.

The conclusions of the workshop will result in the publication of a CEOS WGCV and CGMS-GSICS ‘guidance document’ proposing minimal/desirable characterisation requirements and the means (methods/facilities) to achieve them for various application and instrument types. The guidance will extend to consider optimum ways to document and report calibration and characterisation information, including the associated uncertainties and traceability to SI, in a manner that facilitates transparency to all stakeholders in a standardised manner. The guidance document, to be published within a year of the workshop, will focus on the solar reflective domain but may add an appendix on the TIR.

The workshop will be organised solely in plenary sessions and consider all aspects related to the radiometric performance of an instrument e.g. spectral (accuracy, bandwidth/shape, smile etc), stray-light (out-of-band, out-of-field), gain, non-linearity, polarisation and PSF including some characterisation of on-board calibration and characterisation systems, but not geometric. In addition to some invited presentations, the workshop international scientific committee will call for oral and poster contributions with deadlines set for the spring of 2024.