Destriping GOES images by matching empirical distribution functions

• Published in: Remote sensing of environment 1989-08, Vol.29 (2), p.185-195
• Main Authors: Weinreb, M.P., Xie, R., Lienesch, J.H., D.S. Crosby
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0034-4257; 1879-0704
• DOI: 10.1016/0034-4257(89)90026-6

The current and future geostationary operational environmental satellites (GOES) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are designed to produce visible images of the earth with linear arrays of eight detectors. Because the imaging instruments are not calibrated radiometrically in orbit, differences among instrument gains associated with the different detectors may cause artificial stripes to appear in the images. In the data processing on the ground, the images are “normalized” to remove the stripes. Images from future geostationary satellites, GOES I-M, will be normalized by the method of matching empirical distribution functions (EDFs). In this paper we report on a study of EDF matching with data from GOES-7. The technique was used to generate a normalization look-up table from data taken on 18 May 1988, and the table was applied to image data obtained 2 weeks later, on 1 June 1988. This removed the stripes from the image. The technique is expected to be even more effective with data from GOES I-M because of improvements in instrumentation.