The new spectrometer of the Munich Aerosol Cloud Scanner (specMACS) is a multipurpose hyperspectral cloud and sky imager designated, but is not limited to investigations of cloud–aerosol interactions in Earth's atmosphere. With its high spectral and spatial resolution, the instrument is designed to measure solar radiation in the visible and shortwave infrared region that is reflected from, or transmitted through clouds and aerosol layers. It is based on two hyperspectral cameras that measure in the solar spectral range between 400 and 2500 nm with a spectral bandwidth between 2.5 and 12.0 nm. The instrument was operated in ground-based campaigns as well as aboard the German High Altitude LOng Range (HALO) research aircraft, e.g., during the ACRIDICON-CHUVA campaign in Brazil during summer 2014. This paper describes the specMACS instrument hardware and software design and characterizes the instrument performance. During the laboratory characterization of the instrument, the radiometric response as well as the spatial and spectral resolution was assessed. Since the instrument is primarily intended for retrievals of atmospheric quantities by inversion of radiative models using measured radiances, a focus is placed on the determination of its radiometric response. Radiometric characterization was possible for both spectrometers, with an absolute accuracy of 3 % at their respective central wavelength regions. First measurements are presented which demonstrate the wide applicability of the instrument. They show that key demands are met regarding the radiometric and spectral accuracy which is required for the intended remote sensing techniques.

The spectrometer of the Munich Aerosol Cloud Scanner (specMACS) is a high-spatial-resolution hyperspectral and polarized imaging system. It is operated from a nadir-looking perspective aboard the German High Altitude and LOng range (HALO) research aircraft and is mainly used for the remote sensing of clouds. In 2019, its two hyperspectral line cameras, which are sensitive to the wavelength range between 400 and 2500 nm, were complemented by two 2D RGB polarization-resolving cameras. The polarization-resolving cameras have a large field of view and allow for multi-angle polarimetric imaging with high angular and spatial resolution. This paper introduces the polarization-resolving cameras and provides a full characterization and calibration of them. We performed a geometric calibration and georeferencing of the two cameras. In addition, a radiometric calibration using laboratory calibration measurements was carried out. The radiometric calibration includes the characterization of the dark signal, linearity, and noise as well as the measurement of the spectral response functions, a polarization calibration, vignetting correction, and absolute radiometric calibration. With the calibration, georeferenced, absolute calibrated Stokes vectors rotated into the scattering plane can be computed from raw data. We validated the calibration results by comparing observations of the sunglint, which is a known target, with radiative transfer simulations of the sunglint.

Optical remote sensing and Earth observation instruments rely on precise radiometric calibrations which are generally provided by the broadband emission from large-aperture integrating spheres. The link between the integrating sphere radiance and an SI-traceable radiance standard is made by spectroradiometer measurements. In this work, the calibration efforts of a Spectra Vista Corporation (SVC) HR-1024i spectroradiometer are presented to study how these enable radiance transfer measurements at the Calibration Home Base (CHB) for imaging spectrometers at the Remote Sensing Technology Institute (IMF) of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The spectral and radiometric response calibrations of an SVC HR-1024i spectroradiometer are reported, as well as the measurements of non-linearity and its sensitivity to temperature changes and polarized light. This achieves radiance transfer measurements with the calibrated spectroradiometer with relative expanded uncertainties between 1% and 3% ($k=2$) over the wavelength range of 380 nm to 2500 nm, which are limited by the uncertainties of the applied radiance standard.

Monochromators are a common utility for the spectral calibration of spectrometers. To guarantee traceability of characterization measurements to SI-standards, monochromators used as secondary standards must be properly calibrated. Common calibration procedures are based on the measurement of spectral lines emitted by gas-discharge lamps or lasers. Due to the nature of these light sources, the sampling of calibration points cannot be freely chosen. In this paper we present an approach where an echelle grating wavelength meter (WM) is used to traceably calibrate the emitted center wavelength of a monochromator at almost any sampling interval. In addition, it is possible to calibrate the monochromator outside the sensitive spectral range of the WM used. It is demonstrated how a WM is calibrated and then how it is used to calibrate the monochromator of DLR’s Calibration Home Base (CHB) for imaging spectrometers at DLR Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany. The same approach is also used for the monochromator, which is intended for the laboratory calibration of the German hyperspectral satellite mission EnMAP.

This paper investigates at the example of bathymetry how much an application can profit from comprehensive characterizations required for an improved calibration of data from a state-of-the-art commercial hyperspectral sensor. A NEO HySpex VNIR-1600 sensor is used for this paper, and the improvements are based on measurements of sensor properties not covered by the manufacturer, in particular, detector nonlinearity and stray light. This additional knowledge about the instrument is used to implement corrections for nonlinearity, stray light, spectral smile distortion and nonuniform spectral bandwidth and to base the radiometric calibration on a SI-traceable radiance standard. Bathymetry is retrieved from a data take from the lake Starnberg using WASI-2D. The results using the original and improved calibration procedures are compared with ground reference data, with an emphasis on the effect of stray-light correction. For our instrument, stray-light biases the detector response from 416-500 nm up to 8% and from 700-760 nm up to 5%. Stray-light-induced errors affect bathymetry mainly in water deeper than Secchi depth, whereas in shallower water, the dominant error source is the calibration accuracy of the light source used for radiometric calibration. Stray-light correction reduced the systematic error of water depth by 19% from Secchi depth to three times Secchi depth, whereas the relative standard deviation remained stable at 5%.

In some types of imaging systems, such as imaging spectrometers, the spectral and geometric pixel properties like center wavelength, center angle, response shape and resolution change rapidly between adjacent pixels. Image transformation techniques are required to either correct these effects or to compare images acquired by different systems. In this paper we present a novel image transformation method that allows to manipulate geometric and spectral properties of each pixel individually. The linear transformation employs a transformation matrix to associate every pixel of a target sensor B with all related pixels of a source sensor A. The matrix is derived from the cross-correlations of all sensor A pixels and cross-correlations of sensor A and sensor B pixels. We provide the mathematical background, discuss the propagation of uncertainty, demonstrate the use of the method in a case study, and show that the method is a generalization of the Wiener deconvolution filter. In the study, the transformation of images with random, non-uniform pixel properties to distortion-free images leads to errors that are one order of magnitude smaller than those obtained with a conventional approach.