A practical method of atmospheric correction of SeaWiFS imagery for turbid coastal and inland waters

This work provides a practical method of atmospheric correction for turbid coastal and inland waters where the negative water-leaving radiance occurs. The present method use the property that normalized water-leaving radiance at 412nm is increase very little with the increasing of turbidity. Thus, in very turbid coastal and inland water, we can use Rayleigh-corrected reflectance at 412nm to estimate the aerosol scattering reflectance at 865nm. The performance of the new algorithm is tested with simulation for several cases. It is found that the retrieved remote sensing reflectance is usually in error by <10% for the first six bands of SeaWiFS. This new algorithm is also tested under various atmospheric conditions over the mouth of Changjiang river and Hangzhou bay where the sediment concentration is very high and the standard SeaWiFS atmospheric correction algorithm creates a mask due to atmospheric correction failure. The result proved the efficiency of this simple method in reducing the errors of the water-leaving radiance.