Calibration comparison for the Landsat 4 and 5 multispectral scanners and thematic mappers

On 15 Mar. 1984, during the initial orbital corrections of Landsat 5, data were acquired virtually simultaneously by multispectral scanners (MSSs) and thematic mappers (TMs) on Landsats 4 and 5. A formulation is developed for comparing the calibration of matched instruments (MSS4, MSS5 and TM4, TM5), and spectral interpolation is used to compare the calibration of the nearly equivalent shortwave channels of all four instruments. The MSS instruments are more closely matched in gain with a difference of 6-10% vs -2-14% for the TMs, while radiance comparisons show that the MSSs and TM4 agree reasonably well for a dark surface (water), while TM5 indicates generally lower radiance values in the shortwave channels.