Atmospheric correction of Earth-observation remote sensing images by Monte Carlo method

In earth observation, the atmospheric particles contaminate severely, through absorption and scattering, the reflected electromagnetic signal from the earth surface. It will be greatly beneficial for land surface characterization if we can remove these atmospheric effects from imagery and retrieve surface reflectance that characterizes the surface properties with the purpose of atmospheric correction. Giving the geometric parameters of the studied image and assessing the parameters describing the state of the atmosphere, it is possible to evaluate the atmospheric reflectance, and upward and downward transmittances which take part in the garbling data obtained from the image. To that end, an atmospheric correction algorithm for high spectral resolution data over land surfaces has been developed. It is designed to obtain the main atmospheric parameters needed in the image correction and the interpretation of optical observations. It also estimates the optical characteristics of the Earth-observation imagery (LANDSAT and SPOT). The physics underlying the problem of solar radiation propagations that takes into account multiple scattering and sphericity of the atmosphere has been treated using Monte Carlo techniques.