Remote Sensing of the Earth from Space: Atmospheric Correction

The practical use of space-borne information, its processing and interpretation needs atmospheric correction of aerospace images and spectra. With this book the authors offer a review of this young technique and present their results from 20 years work. The atmospheric modulation transfer function is elucidated from the first theoretical investigations to practical aspects of the atmospheric correction of space imagery. The problems are analysed by modelling the main important parameters, e.g. the atmospheric aerosol, radiative transfer in the Earth's surface - atmosphere systems, interaction of short- and longwave components of the radiation budget with the atmosphere and the Earth's surface.

The monograph being proposed for the English-speaking research community is concentrated on the atmospheric correction of satellite images as a part of thematic interpretation procedures while processing remote sensing data. For linguistic reasons a large section of the community may have been unaware of the progress made in Russia in this field of science and technology. Meanwhile, Russia was the first country to launch the first artificial satellite in 1957 and to obtain from space for the first time spectra of the Earth's atmosphere in the 1960's. New applications of the radiation transfer theory for the atmosphere- underlying surface system appeared first in Russia in the 1970's. Direct and in- verse problems of the atmospheric optics were then formulated giving the scientific basis for studies of natural resources from space. Since that time new mathematical treatments for the atmospheric correction procedures have been widely developed in Russia, including both analytical and numerical tech- niques to simulate spectral, angular, and spatial distributions of the outgoing radiation in visual and infrared regions. The authors of the book were at the beginning of the scientific approach. A wide range of mathematical im- provements to elaborate polinomial approximations for dependencies between atmospheric radiation field and parameters of space surveying was due to the necessity to process satellite images in real time using special software of ex- isted computer means for the studies.