An alternative correction of atmospheric effects for NDVI estimation

Original digital data of satellite image contain not only the peculiar reflectance of the target on the Earth, but also many other kinds of effects. In the environmental monitoring, in order to detect the changes in multi-temporal images, it is necessary to correct these data to a peculiar reflectance of the target, or convert them into the same scale. Atmospheric correction is one of the most important and complicated kinds of correction. A simplified alternative method has already been proposed and successfully applied to the Thematic Mapper (TM) data of the Earth resource observation satellite LANDSAT. In this paper, the alternative atmospheric correction method was extended and applied to the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) on board of NOAA satellites. Atmospheric correction for the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) estimation is also discussed