ABSOLUTE RADIOMETRIC CALIBRATION OF A SPECTROPOLARIMETER.

Abstract

Two identical instruments have been developed for use in the field to make radiometric measurements. They have been described as spectropolarimeters because of their ability to make polarization measurements in narrow spectral passbands. They have been used as part of a NASA sponsored project to monitor the spectral and temporal response of the thematic mapper satellites. These satellites allow many natural and man-tended resources to be monitored over years of time, thus allowing their use to be planned for in the future. The dissertation discusses the design, fabrication, testing and absolute radiometric calibration of these spectropolarimeter instruments. The outstanding feature of these instruments are that they have been calibrated absolutely, for radiance measurements, to an accuracy of 2% - 3%, in the range of 400 nm to 1040 nm over selected spectral passbands. Previously, field measurements were considered good if they had an absolute accuracy of 10%, implying that the present accuracies are advancing the state-of-the-art for field instrument calibrations. These improved accuracies are the result of using two recently developed calibration standards, both of which use detector based methods. These standards are the Electrically Calibrated Pyroelectric Radiometer (ECPR), and the QED-100 quad detector. The end of the dissertation discusses the attempts made to verify that the accuracies claimed are indeed valid, and it is the author's belief that these accuracies have been verified completely.