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The need for monitoring the satellite\u2019s image quality has been boosted by its widespread applications in various fields. The efficient and scientific assessment of the system\u2019s radiometric and polarimetric performance has been essential in its more than five years of service. The authors collected 90 images of the Inner Mongolia calibration site, 888 images of the Amazon rainforest, and 39,929 images of the Chinese mainland from 2017 to 2021. This was achieved whilst covering the leading imaging modes, such as the spotlight mode, stripmap mode, ultra-fine mode, wave imaging mode, etc. In this study, we derive a framework that incorporates the man-made corner reflectors (CRs) in Mongolia, the traditional Amazon rainforest datasets, and even the long-strip data in the Chinese mainland (known as CRAS) for the purposes of GaoFen-3 radiometric quality analysis and polarimetric validation over its five years of operation. Polarimetric calibration without recourse to the CRs is utilized to measure the polarimetric distortions regardless of the region, and thus requires a higher calibration accuracy for the GaoFen-3 polarimetric monitoring task. Consequently, the modified Quegan method is developed by relaxing the target azimuth symmetry constraint with the Amazon forest datasets. The experiments based on the CRAS demonstrate that the main radiometric characteristics could reach the international level, with an estimated noise-equivalent sigma zero of approximately \u221230 dB, a radiometric resolution that is better than 2.9 dB, and a single-imagery relative radiation accuracy that is better than 0.51 dB. For polarimetric validation, the modified Quegan method was utilized to measure the crosstalk for quad-pol products to ensure that it was than \u221240 dB. Meanwhile, non-negligible channel imbalance errors were found in the QPSII and WAV modes, and they were effectively well-calibrated with strip estimators to satisfy the system design.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/rs15061605","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2023,3,16]],"date-time":"2023-03-16T02:40:11Z","timestamp":1678934411000},"page":"1605","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":8,"title":["Radiometric and Polarimetric Quality Validation of Gaofen-3 over a Five-Year Operation Period"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"15","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-0302-664X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Le","family":"Yang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7567-5510","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Lei","family":"Shi","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-8718-1710","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Weidong","family":"Sun","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China"}]},{"given":"Jie","family":"Yang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China"}]},{"given":"Pingxiang","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China"}]},{"given":"Deren","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-5049-9394","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Shanwei","family":"Liu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Oceanography and Space Informatics, China University of Petroleum, Qingdao 266580, China"}]},{"given":"Lingli","family":"Zhao","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2023,3,15]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","unstructured":"Lee, J.-S., and Pottier, E. 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