Principal component analysis of reference sites for Earth observation satellites

Determining reflectance factor and its variability across calibration sites for Earth observation satellites is a problem involving a large number of data. Principal components analysis (PCA) may be used to simplify this problem by reducing the number of data and by highlighting spectral features that could be related to physical phenomena. This work presents the results obtained in applying PCA to two calibration sites in La Craux (France) and Gobabeb (Namibia).