New Methods for Correcting the Atmospheric Effects in Landsat Imagery over Turbid (Case-2) Waters

Abstract

Atmospheric correction of Landsat Visible and Near Infrared imagery (VIS/NIR) over aquatic environment is more demanding than over land because the signal from the water column is small and it carries immense information about biogeochemical variables in the ocean. This paper introduces two new methods, path-extraction and spectral shape matching method (SSMM), for the correction of the atmospheric effects in the Landsat VIS/NIR imagery in relation to the retrieval of meaningful information about the ocean color, especially from Case-2 waters around Korean peninsula. The results of these methods are compared with the classical atmospheric correction approaches based on the 6S radiative transfer model and standard SeaWiFS atmospheric algorithm. The atmospheric correction scheme using 6S radiative transfer code assumes a standard atmosphere with constant aerosol loading and a uniform, Lambertian surface, while the path-extraction assumes that the total radiance (LTOA) of a pixel of the black ocean (referred by Antoine and Morel, 1999) in a given image is considered as the path signal, which remains constant over, at least, the sub scene of Landsat VIS/NIR imagery. The assumption of SSMM is nearly similar, but it extracts the path signal from the LTOA by matching-up the in-situ data of water-leaving radiance, for typical clear and turbid waters, and extrapolate it to be the spatially homogeneous contribution of the scattered signal after complex interaction of light with atmospheric aerosols and Raleigh particles, and direct reflection of light on the sea surface. The overall shape and magnitude of radiance or reflectance spectra of the atmospherically corrected Landsat VIS/NIR imagery by SSMM appears to have good agreement with the in-situ spectra collected for clear and turbid waters, while path-extraction over turbid waters though often reproduces in-situ spectra, but yields significant errors for clear waters due to the invalid assumption of zero water-leaving radi