QUantitative and Automatic Atmospheric Correction (QUAAC): Application and Validation

Abstract

The difficulty of atmospheric correction based on a radiative transfer model lies in the acquisition of synchronized atmospheric parameters, especially the aerosol optical depth (AOD). At the moment, there is no fully automatic and high-efficiency atmospheric correction method to make full use of the advantages of geostationary meteorological satellites in large-scale and efficient atmospheric monitoring. Therefore, a QUantitative and Automatic Atmospheric Correction (QUAAC) method is proposed which can efficiently correct high-spatial-resolution (HSR) satellite images. QUAAC uses the atmospheric aerosol products of geostationary satellites to match the synchronized AOD according to the temporal and spatial information of HSR satellite images. This method solves the problem that the AOD is difficult to obtain or the accuracy is not high enough to meet the demand of atmospheric correction. By using the obtained atmospheric parameters, atmospheric correction is performed to obtain the surface reflectance (SR). The whole process can achieve fully automatic operation without manual intervention. After QUAAC applied to Gaofen-2 (GF-2) HSR satellite and Himawari-8 (H-8) geostationary satellite, the results show that the effect of QUAAC correction is slightly better than that of the Fast Line-of-sight Atmospheric Analysis of Spectral Hypercubes (FLAASH) correction, and the QUAAC−corrected surface spectral curves have good coherence to that of the synchronously measured by field experiments.