A Multi-Temporal and Multi-Spectral Method to Estimate Aerosol Optical Thickness over Land, for the Atmospheric Correction of FormoSat-2, LandSat, VENμS and Sentinel-2 Images

The correction of atmospheric effects is one of the preliminary steps required to make quantitative use of time series of high resolution images from optical remote sensing satellites. An accurate atmospheric correction requires good knowledge of the aerosol optical thickness (AOT) and of the aerosol type. As a first step, this study compares the performances of two kinds of AOT estimation methods applied to FormoSat-2 and LandSat time series of images: a multi-spectral method that assumes a constant relationship between surface reflectance measurements and a multi-temporal method that assumes that the surface reflectances are stable with time. In a second step, these methods are combined to obtain more accurate and robust estimates. The estimated AOTs are compared to in situ measurements on several sites of the AERONET (Aerosol Robotic Network). The methods, based on either spectral or temporal criteria, provide accuracies better than 0.07 in most cases, but show degraded accuracies in some special cases, such as the absence of vegetation for the spectral method or a very quick variation of landscape for the temporal method. The combination of both methods in a new spectro-temporal method increases the robustness of the results in all cases. Remote Sens. 2015, 7 2669