A method for spaceborne synthetic remote sensing of atmospheric aerosol optical depth and vegetation reflectance

Abstract

Spaceborne synthetic remote sensing of atmospheric aerosol optical depth and vegetation reflectance is very significant, but it remains to be a question unresolved yet. Based on the property of vegetation reflectance spectra from near ultra-violet to near infrared and the sensitivity of outgoing radiance to vegetation reflectance and atmospheric aerosol optical depth, a new method for spaceborne synthetic remote sensing of the reflectance and the depth is proposed, and an iteration-correlation inversion algorithm is developed in this paper. According to numerical experiment, effects of radiance error, error in aerosol imaginary index and vegetation medium inhomogeneity on retrieved result are analyzed. Inversion results show that the effect of error in aerosol imaginary index is very important. As the error of aerosol imaginary index is within 0.01, standard errors of aerosol optical depth and vegetation reflectance solutions for 14 spectral channels from 410 nm to 900 nm are respectively less than 0.063 and 0.063 and 0.023. And as the radiance error is within 2%, the standard errors are less than 0.023 and 0.0056.