Auto-retrieval of surface reflectance and albedo from landsat TM/+ETM over rugged terrain with an advanced atmospheric correction algorithm

The present study presents an improved approach to resolve the ambiguities in real reflectance retrieving for rugged terrain surface using the atmospheric radiant transfer theory in association of the utilization of the same spatial resolution DEM as that of TM/ETM+ to account for the fact that most atmospheric parameters tend to be spatially heterogeneous in nature. The method consists of three basic correction procedures, i.e. the radiant correction over sensor, atmospheric radiant correction and topographic radiant correction respectively. This method just needs two dark surfaces at different elevations found in TM Bands blue and red from TM/ETM + imagery, and the atmospheric properties can be determined spatially in a way similar in principles to Gilabert's but differs by introducing the DEM to extend the unique atmospheric properties to the distributed regimes. The topographic radiant correction algorithm thus was developed to ensure the removal of the topographic effects as much as possible using the distributed atmospheric property information obtained as above mentioned. By this way, the TM/ETM+ imaginary can be corrected not only atmospherically but also topographically for TM/ETM + bands 1-5 and 7. Finally, a band integration method was used to obtain the total continuous spectral albedo over the experiment site at the Heihe River Basin, and the results show the fairly satisfied performance of the method in real surface reflectance retrieval and the further inversion on surface albedo. © 2005 IEEE.