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Expectations of the Operational Land Imager (OLI) radiometric performance onboard Landsat-8 have been met or exceeded. The calibration activities that occurred prior to launch provided calibration parameters that enabled ground processing to produce imagery that met most requirements when data were transmitted to the ground. Since launch, calibration updates have improved the image quality even more, so that all requirements are met. These updates range from detector gain coefficients to reduce striping and banding to alignment parameters to improve the geometric accuracy. This paper concentrates on the on-orbit radiometric performance of the OLI, excepting the radiometric calibration performance. Topics discussed in this paper include: signal-to-noise ratios that are an order of magnitude higher than previous Landsat missions; radiometric uniformity that shows little residual banding and striping, and continues to improve; a dynamic range that limits saturation to extremely high radiance levels; extremely stable detectors; slight nonlinearity that is corrected in ground processing; detectors that are stable and 100% operable; and few image artifacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) requirements for noise, stability, and uniformity were designed to ensure the radiometric integrity of the data products. Since the launch of Landsat 8 in February 2013, many of these evaluations have been based on routine measurements of the onboard calibration sources, which include a variable-temperature blackbody and a deep space view port. The noise equivalent change in temperature (NEdT) of TIRS data is approximately 0.05 K @ 300 K in both bands, exceeding requirements by about a factor of 8 and Landsat 7 ETM+ performance by a factor of 3. Coherent noise is not readily apparent in TIRS data. No apparent change in the detector linearization has been observed. The radiometric stability of the TIRS instrument over the period between radiometric calibrations (about 40 min) is less than one count of dark current and the variation in terms of radiance is less than 0.015 W=m2=sr=μm (or 0.13 K) at 300 K, easily meeting the short term stability requirements. Long term stability analysis has indicated a degradation of about 0.2% or less per year. The operational calibration is only updated using the biases taken every orbit, due to the fundamental stability of the instrument. By combining the data from two active detector rows per band, 100% detector operability is maintained for the instrument. No trends in the noise, operability, or short term radiometric stability are apparent over the mission life. The uniformity performance is more difficult to evaluate as scene-varying banding artifacts have been observed in Earth imagery. Analyses have shown that stray light is affecting the recorded signal from the Earth and inducing the banding depending on the content of the surrounding Earth surface. As the stray light effects are stronger in the longer wavelength TIRS band11 (12.0 μm), the uniformity is better in the shorter wavelength band10 (10.9 μm). Both bands have exceptional noise and stability performance and band10 has generally adequate uniformity performance and should currently be used in preference to band11. The product uniformity will improve with the stray light corrections being developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]