Atmospheric Correction Problems with Multi-Temporal High Spatial Resolution Images from Different Satellite Sensors

Atmospheric correction is an essential part in time-series analysis on biophysical parameters of surface features. In this study, we tried to examine possible problems in atmospheric correction of multi-temporal High Spatial Resolution (HSR) images obtained from two different sensor systems. Three KOMPSAT-2 and two IKONOS-2 multispectral images were used. Three atmospheric correction methods were applied to derive surface reflectance: (1) Radiative Transfer (RT) - based absolute atmospheric correction method, (2) the Dark Object Subtraction (DOS) method, and (3) the Cosine Of the Uun zeniTh angle (COST) method. Atmospheric correction results were evaluated by comparing spectral reflectance values extracted from invariant targets and vegetation cover types. In overall, multi-temporal reflectance from five images obtained from January to December did not show consistent pattern in invariant targets and did not follow a typical profile of vegetation growth in forests and rice field. The multi-temporal reflectance values were different by sensor type and atmospheric correction methods. The inconsistent atmospheric correction results from these multi-temporal HSR images may be explained by several factors including unstable radiometric calibration coefficients for each sensor and wide range of sun and sensor geometry with the off-nadir viewing HSR images.