Passive satellite sensing of the Earth’s surface through gaps in cloudy fields
M.V. Tarasenkov, M.N. Zonov, V.V. Belov, M.V. Engel
V.E. Zuev Institute of Atmospheric Optics of Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Science, Tomsk, Russia
Keywords: passive satellite sensing of the Earth’s surface, atmospheric correction, Earth’s surface reflection coefficients, broken cloudiness
Abstract
An algorithm for estimating sizes of regions affected by cloudiness on the errors of retrieval the reflection coefficients of the Earth’s surface areas observed through gaps in a cloudy field is suggested. The algorithm is based on statistical simulation by the Monte-Carlo method of the process of radiation transfer through broken stochastic cloudiness. Two stochastic models of cloudy fields are considered: 1) clouds shaped as parallelepipeds and 2) clouds shaped as paraboloids. The method is tested for two fragments of actual MODIS images. It is shown that the broken cloudiness influences the error in the reflection coefficient retrieved at distances from 5-7 to 25 km from the observation point (depending on the observation conditions).
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