Atmospheric correction of MODIS thermal infrared bands by water vapor scaling method

Abstract

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) project has operationally provided land surface temperature (LST) and emissivity imagery produced from mid-infrared bands by either of two atmospheric correction algorithms. One is the generalized split-window algorithm. This algorithm can be applied to each observed scene, and the spatial resolution of generated products is 1 km, but the emissivity data in the products are empirically estimated by a classification-based method. Another is the physics-based day/night algorithm. In this algorithm, both LST and emissivity are physically determined using mid-infrared measurements, but a pair of day/night scenes is necessary for each processing, and the spectral resolution of generated products is degraded to 5 km. In the present paper, the water vapor scaling (WVS) method (Tonooka, 2001 and 2005) is applied to three MODIS thermal infrared (TIR) bands (29, 31, and 32) as an alternative approach. This method is an atmospheric correction algorithm for TIR multi-spectral data including land surfaces, designed mainly for the five TIR spectral bands of the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on the Terra satellite. The WVS method is on the basis of a traditional approach using a radiative transfer code, such as MODTRAN, combined with external atmospheric profiles, but the errors included in profiles are reduced on a pixel-by-pixel basis using an extended multi-channel approach. In the present paper, the WVS method for the three MODIS TIR bands is proposed, and applied to actual imagery for preliminary validation.