Modeling directional–hemispherical reflectance and transmittance of fresh and dry leaves from 0.4 μm to 5.7 μm with the PROSPECT-VISIR model

Vegetation water content retrieval using passive remote sensing techniques in the 0.4–2.5 μm region (reflection of solar radiation) and the 8–14 μm region (emission of thermal radiation) has given rise to an abundant literature. The wavelength range in between, where the main water absorption bands are located, has surprisingly received very little attention because of the complexity of the radiometric signal that mixes both reflected and emitted fluxes. Nevertheless, it is now covered by the latest generation of passive optical sensors (e.g. SEBASS, AHS). This work aims at modeling leaf spectral reflectance and transmittance in the infrared, particularly between 3 μm and 5 μm, to improve the retrieval of vegetation water content using hyperspectral data. Two unique datasets containing 32 leaf samples each were acquired in 2008 at the USGS National Center, Reston (VA, USA) and the ONERA Research Center, Toulouse (France). Reflectance and transmittance were recorded using laboratory spectrometers in the spectral region from 0.4 μm to 14 μm, and the leaf water and dry matter contents were determined. It turns out that these spectra are strongly linked to water content up to 5.7 μm. This dependence is much weaker further into the infrared, where spectral features seem to be mainly associated with the biochemical composition of the leaf surface. The measurements show that leaves transmit light in this wavelength domain and that the transmittance of dry samples can reach 0.35 of incoming light around 5 μm, and 0.05 around 11 μm. This work extends the PROSPECT leaf optical properties model by taking into account the high absorption levels of leaf constituents (by the insertion of the complex Fresnel coefficients) and surface phenomena (by the addition of a top layer). The new model, PROSPECT-VISIR (VISible to InfraRed), simulates leaf reflectance and transmittance between 0.4 μm and 5.7 μm (at 1 nm spectral resolution) with a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.017 and 0.018, respectively. Model inversion also allows the prediction of water (RMSE = 0.0011 g/cm²) and dry matter (RMSE = 0.0013 g/cm²) contents.