About TACT

TACT is the Thermal Atmospheric Correction Tool for Landsat developed at RBINS. It retrieves ERA5 atmospheric profiles and uses libRadtran to compute the atmospheric transmittance, and down- and upwelling radiances. Currently TACT outputs the Water Surface Temperature (WST) in each thermal band present on the Landsat sensor, assuming a constant (water) emissivity over the scene. The method and validation using Landsat 8/TIRS data is presented in Vanhellemont, 2020 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2019.111518).

This repository will probably no longer be maintained, please check out TACT integration in the generic ACOLITE: https://github.com/acolite/acolite

TACT development was funded by the Belgian Science Policy Office BRAIN-be program under contract BR/165/A1/MICROBIAN.

TACT is provided by RBINS as an experimental tool, without explicit or implied warranty. Use of the program is at your own discretion and risk.

Dependencies

TACT is coded in Python 3, and requires the following Python packages to run with all functionality:numpy scipy pyproj gdal netcdf4 python-dateutil

TACT needs libRadtran to be installed: http://libradtran.org/doku.php

TACT needs the user to have an account at the Research Data Archive (RDA) at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR): https://rda.ucar.edu/

Installation & Configuration

• cd into a suitable directory and clone the git repository: git clone https://github.com/acolite/tact

• cd into the new tact directory cd tact

• Edit the tact configuration file nano config/config.txt and add the full path to the libRadtran directory on your system to the libradtran_dir= setting

• Edit your .netrc file to add your RDA UCAR credentials: nano $HOME/.netrc, with $l and $p your login and password respectively for the RDA:

        machine rda.ucar.edu
        login $l
        password $l
  

• Edit your .dodsrc file to point to your .netrc file: nano $HOME/.dodsrc. Write the full path explicitly: HTTP.NETRC=/path/to/.netrc

• run python tact.py --input $in --output $out where $in is the full path to an extracted L1 Landsat bundle, and $out the full path to the target output directory (which will be generated).

Options

• --limit a four coordinate bounding box (S,W,N,E) for processing of a specific region of interest
• --export_geotiff True/False for exporting datasets as GeoTIFF