Salton Sea
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The Salton Sea is an inland saline lake located in the Sonoran Desert in southeastern California. Salton Sea is approximately 60 km long and 20 km wide and has the largest surface area of all the inland water bodies in California. Salton Sea is a less ideal target for thermal sensor calibration because its surface is located 71 m below sea level and contains a thick atmosphere. The temperature can be as high as 35 °C in the summertime, and this is useful for calibration work [1]. The range of temperature is between 12 °C to 37°C [2].
The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has established validation sites at both the Salton Sea and Lake Tahoe. These sites are suitable for the validation of high to medium resolution thermal sensors. JPL has maintained an instrumented measurement platform on Salton Sea since 2008. The lake has been used for thermal band calibration for multiple instruments, including Landsat 7, Landsat 8, ASTER, MODIS, and VIIRS. This site was recently used for the in-flight validation work of ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS), which was launched to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2018 [2].
| Location (City, State, Country): |
Salton Sea, California, USA, North America
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| Landsat WRS - 2 Path / Row: |
39/37
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| Center Latitude (degrees): |
N 33.22532
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| Center Longitude (degrees): |
W 115.82425
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| CEOS Region of Interest |
N 33.23, W 115.82 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 |
| Purpose: |
Radiometry
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| Co-located Instrumented Networks: |
AERONET
NDBC
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| Status: |
Active
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- Barsi, Julia A., John R. Schott, Simon J. Hook, Nina G. Raqueno, Brian L. Markham, and Robert G. Radocinski. "Landsat-8 thermal infrared sensor (TIRS) vicarious radiometric calibration." Remote Sensing 6, no. 11 (2014): 11607-11626.
- Hook, Simon J., Kerry Cawse-Nicholson, Julia Barsi, Robert Radocinski, Glynn C. Hulley, William R. Johnson, Gerardo Rivera, and Brian Markham. "In-flight validation of the ECOSTRESS, Landsats 7 and 8 thermal infrared spectral channels using the Lake Tahoe CA/NV and Salton Sea CA automated validation sites." IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing 58, no. 2 (2019): 1294-1302.
- NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) California Institute of Technology Salton Sea Validation
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.