Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-2015

Description

The first year of available Landsat 8 data over the conterminous United States (CONUS), composed of 11,296 acquisitions sensed over more than 11 thousand million 30 m pixel locations, was analyzed comparing the spatial and temporal incidence of 30 m cloud and cirrus states available in the standard Landsat 8 Level 1 product suite. This comprehensive data analysis revealed that on average over a year of CONUS observations (i) 35.9% were detected with high confidence cloud, with spatio-temporal patterns similar to those observed by previous Landsat 5 and 7 cloud analyses; (ii) 28.2% were high confidence cirrus; (iii) 20.1% were both high confidence cloud and high confidence cirrus; and (iv) 6.9% were detected as high confidence cirrus but low confidence cloud. The results illustrate the potential of the 30 m cloud and cirrus states available in the standard Landsat 8 Level 1 product suite but imply that the historical CONUS Landsat archive has about 7% of undetected cirrus contaminated pixels. Systematic cloud detection commission errors over a minority of highly reflective exposed soil/sand surfaces were found and it is recommended that caution be taken when using the currently available Landsat 8 cloud data over similar surfaces.

Publication Title

Remote Sensing of Environment

Volume

7

First Page

564

Last Page

578

DOI of Published Version

10.3390/rs70100564

Editor(s)

Prasad S. Thenkabail

Pages

15

Language

en

Publisher

MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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