Validation and refinement of hyperspectral/multispectral atmospheric compensation using shadowband radiometers

First-principles atmospheric compensation of Earth-viewing spectral imagery requires atmospheric property information derived from the image itself or measured independently. A field experiment was conducted in May, 2003 at Davis, CA to investigate the consistency of atmospheric properties and surface reflectances derived from simultaneous ground-, aircraft- and satellite-based spectral measurements. The experiment involved the simultaneous collection of HyMap hyperspectral and Landsat-7 multispectral imagery, in situ reflectance spectra of calibration surfaces, and sun and sky radiances from ultraviolet and visible multifilter rotating shadowband radiometers (MFRSRs). The data were analyzed using several different radiation transport and atmospheric compensation algorithms. Reasonable self-consistency was found between aerosol property retrievals from the radiometers and from dark pixels of the imagery, and, when using the most accurate algorithm, there was excellent agreement between the retrieved surface spectra and the ground truth measurements.