Atmospheric compensation for WorldView-2 satellite and in-water component retrieval

In the present work, the WorldView-2 (WV2) capability for retrieving Case 2 water components is analyzed. In the Case 2 water problem, the sensor-reaching signal due to water is very small when compared to the signal due to the atmospheric effects. Therefore, adequate atmospheric compensation becomes an important first step to accurately retrieve water parameters. The problem becomes more difficult when using multispectral imagery as there are typically only a handful of bands suitable for performing atmospheric compensation. In this work, we test atmospheric compensation techniques for the WV2 satellite, enabling it to be used for water constituent retrieval in both deep and shallow water. A look-up-table (LUT) methodology is implemented to retrieve the water parameters for a simulated case study. The in-water radiative transfer code HydroLight is used to simulate reflectance data in this study while the MODTRAN code is used to simulate atmospheric effects. This data is used to test the proposed methodology. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is performed to evaluate how sensitive the constituent retrieval process is to adequate atmospheric compensation.