Decoding the Quality Assessment Radiometric Saturation (QA_RADSAT) Band

In this tutorial, we show the effects of radiometric saturation on the Surface Reflectance Bands for a single pixel from Mount Adams, Yakima, Washington. Mount Adams currently supports ten active glaciers, and has consistent snow cover. Thus, it is an excellent survey area to test radiometric saturation from reflective snow. Below, we retrieve and plot the values from all reflectance bands for the pixel location. We also use the QA_RADSAT band to highlight the bands labeled as saturated. Users are then shown how to filter out observations with saturated reflectance bands.