Operational atmospheric correction of AVHRR visible and near infrared data

The Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometers (AVHRR) on board the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) series of satellites have been in continuous polar orbit since 1979. The extent of the temporal, spatial and spectral resolutions of the data set generated by this radiometer makes it very valuable for global studies. It has been used by several authors to demonstrate the potential of remote sensing for large scale terrestrial investigations (Becker et al., 1988; Gatlin et al., 1983; Justice et al., 1985). The signal at satellite level is affected by different atmospheric effects. Ozone and water vapor absorption bands affect AVHRR visible and near infrared channels respectively. Rayleigh scattering mainly affects the visible channel and aerosol scattering, which is certainly the most challenging term, affects both channels. The authors present a brief description of their preprocessing chain and of the atmospheric corrections applied to the data