Namib Desert 2

EROS Cal/Val Center of Excellence (ECCOE)
Test Sites Catalog
Namib Desert 2
Landsat 8 LandsatLook Image Path 182 Row 72 Acquired 13 Jun 2020 with ROI indicated Google Earth Image centered on White Sands ROI

Description

Namib Desert 2 is located in Namibia, Africa, and is considered an instrumented calibration site. It is located about 160 kilometers (km) southeast of Gobabeb (S 23.55, E 15.03), which is about 10 km away from the Gobabeb Research and Training Center, on the edge of the Namib desert [1]. In this site, pockmarks and some dunes are present at detailed scales, but these are more pronounced toward the northwest region. Unlike other desert areas, this region has spatial uniformity and temporal stability for smaller areas [2]. Small spatially homogeneous patches of 7 km x 7 km have been found.

Usability

Namib Desert 2 has been used as a vicarious calibration test site for sensor calibration. 

Closest AERONET station = Gobabeb [23.56°, 15.04°] 

Location (City, State, Country):
Namibia, Africa
Landsat WRS - 2 Path / Row:
182/72
Center Latitude (degrees):
S 17.33
Center Longitude (degrees):
E 12.05
CEOS Region of Interest

S 17.33, E 12.05

Search this area in EarthExplorer (Landsat 8-9 Collection 2 Level-1) - date range, datasets, cloud cover and other criteria can be modified once initial results are returned

KML (Need help with this file?)

Size of Usable Area (km):
7 x 7
UTM Zone:
33
Altitude above sea level (meters):
475
Purpose:
Radiometry
Status:
Active

References:
  1. Marcq, Sébastien, Aimé Meygret, Marc Bouvet, Nigel Fox, Claire Greenwell, Barry Scott, Béatrice Berthelot, Bruno Besson, Nicolas Guilleminot, and Bahaiddin Damiri. "New RadCalNet site at Gobabeb, Namibia: Installation of the instrumentation and first satellite calibration results." In IGARSS 2018-2018 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, pp. 6444-6447. IEEE, 2018. 
  2. Bacour, Cédric, Xavier Briottet, François-Marie Bréon, Françoise Viallefont-Robinet, and Marc Bouvet. "Revisiting Pseudo Invariant Calibration Sites (PICS) over sand deserts for vicarious calibration of optical imagers at 20 km and 100 km scales." Remote Sensing 11, no. 10 (2019): 1166. 

Note: This information has been compiled by the USGS ECCOE Team, using the best sources currently known. Updates will be made as more information becomes available. Please contact eccoe@usgs.gov with any updates you would like to contribute.