Arkadii P. Ivanov

Iterative procedure for retrieval of spectral aerosol optical thickness and surface reflectance from satellite data using fast radiative transfer code and its application to MERIS measurements

The retrieval of aerosol characteristics over land from satellite data has been a challenge up to now. Currently, several well known techniques for retrieving aerosol optical thickness (AOT) have been developed for satellite instruments including MODIS (Kaufman et al., 1997; Remer et al., 2005), MERIS (Santer et al., 1999, 2000), POLDER (Deuze et al, 2001), and MISR (Martonchik et al., 2002). While each technique has its own merits, the accuracy of AOT retrieval still needs further clarification and improvement. From this point of view the inter-comparison and verification of these techniques undertaken recently (Kokhanovsky et al., 2007) is of a great importance.

Retrieval of optical characteristics of the aerosol atmosphere and Earth’s surface by the joint processing of different satellite information

Methods and algorithms for the retrieval of optical characteristics of the aerosol atmosphere and underlying surface by data from a multispectral satellite sensor (MSSS) are described. A procedure for the joint processing of MSSS and multizonal imaging system (MZIS) data is proposed and described with the aim of retrieving the albedo of the Earth’s surface with a high spatial resolution. In this case the spectral optical characteristics of the aerosol atmosphere are retrieved by MSSS data in the visible range of 400–700 nm. According to these results, transmission functions of the atmosphere in MZIS spectral channels are calculated and an atmospheric correction of MZIS data is performed. The accuracy of determining the albedo of the underlying surface in spectral channels of MZIS with high-spatial-resolution is estimated.