Impact of Topographic Correction on PRISMA Sentinel 2 and Landsat 8 Images

Abstract

Over the past decades, remote sensing satellite sensors have significantly increased their performance and, at the same time, differed in their characteristics. Therefore, making the data repeatable over time and uniform with respect to different platforms has become one of the most challenging issues to obtain a representation of the intrinsic characteristics of the observed target. In this context, atmospheric correction has the role of cleaning the signal from unwanted contributions and moving from the sensor radiance to a quantity more closely related to the intrinsic properties of the target, such as ground reflectance. To this end, atmospheric correction procedures must consider a number of factors, closely related to the specific scene acquired and to the characteristics of the sensor. In mountainous environments, atmospheric correction must include a topographic correction level to compensate for the topographic effects that heavily affect the remote signal. In this paper, we want to estimate the impact of topographic correction on remote sensing images based on a statistical analysis, using data acquired under different illumination conditions with different sensors. We also want to show the benefits of introducing this level of correction in second level products such as PRISMA L2C reflectance, which currently do not implement it.