Abstract
Rugged terrain, including mountains, hills, and some high lands are typical land surfaces around the world. As a physical parameter for characterizing the anisotropic reflectance of the land surface, the importance of the bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) has been gradually recognized in the remote sensing community, and great efforts have been dedicated to build BRDF models over various terrain types. However, on rugged terrain, the topography intensely affects the shape and magnitude of the BRDF and creates challenges in modeling the BRDF. In this paper, after a brief introduction of the theoretical background of the BRDF over rugged terrain, the status of estimating land surface BRDF properties over rugged terrain is comprehensively reviewed from a historical perspective and summarized in two categories: BRDFs describing solo slopes and those describing composite slopes. The discussion focuses on land surface reflectance retrieval over mountainous areas, the difference in solo slope and composite slope BRDF models, and suggested future research to improve the accuracy of BRDFs derived with remote sensing satellites.
Highlights
Rugged terrain covers approximately 24% of the Earth’s land surface, plays an important role in the complex earth system, and forms a unique mountainous climate and ecosystem
Remote sensing of anisotropic reflectance relates the land surface scattering behavior to its optics and structure, which is described with the bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) [8]
We suggest that a high quality and high spatial resolution digital elevation model (DEM) is necessary for BRDF modeling based on both high resolution and low resolution remote sensing images, which correspond to the solo slope BRDF modeling and composite slope modeling, respectively
Summary
Rugged terrain covers approximately 24% of the Earth’s land surface, plays an important role in the complex earth system, and forms a unique mountainous climate and ecosystem. The current remote sensing BRDF concept and modeling over rugged terrain should consider the topographic effects. With the decrease in spatial resolution, the influence of topography on pixel scale reflectance will gradually decrease This causes a lot of the low resolution land surface reflectance to ignore the effects of topography during atmospheric correction (e.g., moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) reflectance).The reflectance that does consider the topographic influence focuses on only the relatively high resolution remote sensing data (e.g., Landsat Thematic Mapper (Landsat/TM). The characterization of land surface anisotropic reflectance over rugged terrain should be implemented from a systematic perspective by analyzing the critical scientific problems and reviewing current algorithms, which will benefit algorithm developers and broaden the interests of surface BRDF users. FigurFeig5u. rRee5fe. rRenefceerepnlcaenepclaonnefigcounrfaitgiounraotivoner osvoelor ssloolpoes(l(oap)esl(o(pa)e-sploaprael-lpealrwalhleiltewphlaitneepalnande(ba)ndho(rbiz)ontal referehnocreizpolnatnael)reafnedrecnocme pploasniete) asnlodpceo(m(cp)ohsoitreizsolonpteal((rce)fehroernizcoenptalalnreefeartetnhceehpilgahneesattptohienht)i.ghest point)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
