Uncertainty propagation algorithm from the radiometric calibration to the restored earth observation radiance.

The uncertainty of the radiometric calibration affects the accuracy of the earth observation (EO) radiance restored from the remote sensing digital number (DN) data. However, it has not been intensively analyzed whether they are equivalent to each other. The algorithm to deduce the uncertainty of the restored EO radiance in the solar-reflective spectral range (400-2500 nm) along the uncertainty propagation chain in the radiometric calibration process is proposed. It was validated compared with the traditional calibration uncertainty algorithm through an example of calibrating an imaging spectrometer. The interval about the real EO radiance and the corresponding level of confidence was reported as a result, which shows the possibility to accurately expressing the quality of the restored EO radiance following the rules used in the field of metrology.