Atmospheric correction of SeaWiFS imagery: assessment of the use of alternative bands

Spatial inhomogeneity, or speckling, frequently occurs in Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (Sea-WiFS) data products such as water-leaving radiance and chlorophyll concentration. We have found that this effect may be caused by high-altitude aerosols or thin cirrus clouds or even by digitization errors. For the scenes evaluated, whitecaps were ruled out as a likely cause of these errors. We tried to avoid using the 765-nm band, which is affected by O-2 absorption and is more sensitive to digitization errors, by instead using the 670-nm band in the atmospheric correction and found that speckling for either cloud-free areas or cloud-adjacent areas was significantly reduced. (C) 2000 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: 280.0280, 280.1310.