Remote sensing of aerosols in urban areas: sun/shadow retrieval procedure from airborne very high spatial resolution images

Remote sensing of urban areas is currently in significant development thanks to the achievement of new instruments allowing the observation of cities at very high spatial resolution (~1m). With such sensors, appropriate techniques must be developed. The characterization of urban aerosols to perform atmospheric corrections of remote sensing images is an issue that can take advantage of those new possibilities. A new characterization procedure of the atmospheric particles is presented in this paper. Based on the observation of sun/shadow transitions, it allows the retrieval of an aerosol model and of its spectral optical thickness. Retrieval results performed with synthetic images are presented to show the potential of this new method.