Portable traceability solution for ground-based calibration of optical instruments

We present a portable traceability solution for the ground-based optical calibration of earth observation (EO) instruments. Currently, traceability for this type of calibration is typically based on spectral irradiance sources (e.g. FEL lamps) calibrated at a national metrology institute (NMI). Disadvantages of this source-based traceability are the inflexibility in operating conditions of the source, which are limited to the settings used during calibration at the NMI, and the susceptibility to aging, which requires frequent recalibrations, and which cannot be easily checked on-site. The detector-based traceability solution presented in this work uses a portable filter radiometer to calibrate light sources onsite, immediately before and after, or even during instrument calibration. The filter radiometer itself is traceable to the primary standard of radiometry in the Netherlands. We will discuss the design and realization, calibration and performance verification.