Rj. Flowerdew et Jd. Haigh, RETRIEVAL OF AEROSOL OPTICAL-THICKNESS OVER LAND USING THE ATSR-2 DUAL-LOOK SATELLITE RADIOMETER, Geophysical research letters, 23(4), 1996, pp. 351-354
We present a new method of retrieving aerosol optical thickness over l
and that takes advantage of the dual look capability of the ATSR-2 ins
trument. Unlike some methods, the approach does not require dense dark
vegetation to be located, nor is it dependent upon invariant targets,
nor does it assume that the underlying surface reflectance is purely
Lambertian. It makes use of a new surface approximation that exploits
the property of the surface which is least variable with wavelength to
allow atmospheric parameters to be retrieved and, consequently, is ap
plicable over virtually any land surface. The method is tested using s
imulated ATSR-2 measurements based upon a radiative transfer model cou
pled with a surface bidirectional model that includes the hot-spot eff
ect, and is shown to be robust to the effects of differing underlying
canopy types. At high optical depths, the retrieval process achieves a
mean error in optical thickness of less than 2.5%, depending on surfa
ce type, with a maximum absolute error (for the same data sets) of 5%
while at low optical depths errors are of the order of 5%. The effects
of systematic error in the simulated radiances are also shown. The me
thod may be readily extended to other multiple look satellite radiomet
ers.