THE Development of a Standardised Validation Approach for Surface Reflectance Data

Earth Observation (EO) satellite data are the single most important and richest source of environmental information for Australia. Data from operational missions, such as the USA Landsat and the EU Copernicus missions, are important data sources underpinning a range of research and operational uses across the continent. To provide confidence in the data from these active EO missions, work is currently underway in Australia to develop a national framework for the validation of these data. Specifically, data that has been reduced to surface reflectance (SR) will be comprehensively validated to provide a standardised well-calibrated dataset for the Australian EO user community. This paper reports on an approach for continental-scale validation of the Digital Earth Australia (DEA) SR product using field-based measurements that will be acquired near-synchronous to satellite observations over multiple sites across Australia.