ATMOSPHERIC CORRECTIONS FOR REMOTELY-SENSED THERMAL DATA IN A COOL HUMID TEMPERATE ZONE

This research emphasizes the necessity of carrying out atmospheric corrections in order to obtain accurate absolute temperature values for terrestrial objects, from remotely-sensed data. Satellite data were available for thermal band 6 on Landsat-5. They were complemented by simultaneously-acquired airborne and ground-truth data. Radiosonde data were fed into the computer program LOWTRAN 6. The ground-based data indicated that the use of the LOWTRAN 6 model applied to low-level airborne measurements was very satisfactory (variations of only 0.01-0.61 deg K being noted). However, for the satellite-borne detector the results were much less satisfactory (variations of 0.26-2.05 deg K), because of lower radiometric and spatial resolving power. © 1990 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.