Correction of aerosol effects on multi-temporal images acquired with constant viewing angles: Application to Formosat-2 images

This paper presents a new method developed for the atmospheric correction of the images that will be acquired by the Venμs satellite after its launch expected in early 2010. Every two days, the Venμs mission will provide 10 m resolution images of 50 sites, in 12 narrow spectral bands ranging from 415 nm to 910 nm. The sun-synchronous Venμs orbit will have a 2-day repeat cycle, and the images of a given site will always be acquired from the same place, at the same local hour, with constant observation angles. Thanks to these characteristics, the directional effects will be considerably reduced since only the solar angles will slowly vary with time.The algorithm that will be implemented for the atmospheric correction of Venμs data is being developed using both radiative transfer simulations and the actual data acquired by the Formosat-2 satellite. Because of its one-day sun-synchronous repeat cycle, Formosat-2 acquires images with a sun-viewing geometry close to the one Venμs will offer. With this geometry, reflectance time series are free from directional effects on the short term, a feature which reduces the number of unknowns to retrieve. The atmospheric corrections algorithm exploits this feature and the two following assumptions:–Aerosol optical properties vary quickly with time but slowly with location.–Surface reflectances vary quickly with location but slowly with time.Consequently, the top of atmosphere reflectance short term variations (10 to 15 days) are mainly due to the variations of aerosol optical properties, and it is thus possible to use these variations to characterise the atmospheric aerosols and to retrieve surface reflectances.This paper first describes the aerosol inversion method we developed and its results when applied to simulations. In the second part, we show the first tests of the method against three data sets acquired by Formosat-2 images with constant observation angles. Aeronet sun photometers measurements were available on all sites. Formosat-2 estimates of optical thickness compare favourably with Aeronet in situ measurements, leading to a noticeable improvement of the smoothness of time series of surface reflectances after atmospheric correction.