• Journal of Satellite, Information and Communications
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.1-7
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• 2006

GOCi (Geostationary Ocean Color Imager) is one of the COMS payloads that KARI is currently developing and scheduled to be in operation from around 2008. Its primary objective is to monitor the Korean coastal water environmental condition. We report the current progress in development of the integrated optical model as one of the key analysis tools for the GOCI in-orbit performance verification. The model includes the Sun as the emitting light source. The curved Earth surface section of 2500 km x 2500 km includingthe Korean peninsular os defined as a Lambertian scattering surface consisted of land and sea surface. From its geostationary orbit, the GOCI optical system observes the reflected light from the surfaces with varying reflectance representing the changes in its environmental conditions. The optical ray tracing technique was used to demonstrate the GOCI in-orbit performances such as red tide detection. The computational concept, simulation results and its implications to the on-going development of GOCI are presented.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.289-305
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• 2004

Atmospheric correction of Landsat Visible and Near Infrared imagery (VIS/NIR) over aquatic environment is more demanding than over land because the signal from the water column is small and it carries immense information about biogeochemical variables in the ocean. This paper introduces two methods, a modified dark-pixel substraction technique (path--extraction) and our spectral shape matching method (SSMM), for the correction of the atmospheric effects in the Landsat VIS/NIR imagery in relation to the retrieval of meaningful information about the ocean color, especially from Case-2 waters (Morel and Prieur, 1977) around Korean peninsula. The results of these methods are compared with the classical atmospheric correction approaches based on the 6S radiative transfer model and standard SeaWiFS atmospheric algorithm. The atmospheric correction scheme using 6S radiative transfer code assumes a standard atmosphere with constant aerosol loading and a uniform, Lambertian surface, while the path-extraction assumes that the total radiance (L/sub TOA/) of a pixel of the black ocean (referred by Antoine and Morel, 1999) in a given image is considered as the path signal, which remains constant over, at least, the sub scene of Landsat VIS/NIR imagery. The assumption of SSMM is nearly similar, but it extracts the path signal from the L/sub TOA/ by matching-up the in-situ data of water-leaving radiance, for typical clear and turbid waters, and extrapolate it to be the spatially homogeneous contribution of the scattered signal after complex interaction of light with atmospheric aerosols and Raleigh particles, and direct reflection of light on the sea surface. The overall shape and magnitude of radiance or reflectance spectra of the atmospherically corrected Landsat VIS/NIR imagery by SSMM appears to have good agreement with the in-situ spectra collected for clear and turbid waters, while path-extraction over turbid waters though often reproduces in-situ spectra, but yields significant errors for clear waters due to the invalid assumption of zero water-leaving radiance for the black ocean pixels. Because of the standard atmosphere with constant aerosols and models adopted in 6S radiative transfer code, a large error is possible between the retrieved and in-situ spectra. The efficiency of spectral shape matching has also been explored, using SeaWiFS imagery for turbid waters and compared with that of the standard SeaWiFS atmospheric correction algorithm, which falls in highly turbid waters, due to the assumption that values of water-leaving radiance in the two NIR bands are negligible to enable retrieval of aerosol reflectance in the correction of ocean color imagery. Validation suggests that accurate the retrieval of water-leaving radiance is not feasible with the invalid assumption of the classical algorithms, but is feasible with SSMM.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.445-456
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• 2005

The land surface parameters should be determined with sufficient accuracy, because these play an important role in climate change near the ground. As the surface reflectance presents strong anisotropy, off-nadir viewing results a strong dependency of observations on the Sun - target - sensor geometry. They contribute to the random noise which is produced by surface angular effects. The principal objective of the study is to provide a database of accurate surface reflectance eliminated the angular effects from MODIS 250m reflective channel data over Korea. The MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) sensor has provided visible and near infrared channel reflectance at 250m resolution on a daily basis. The successive analytic processing steps were firstly performed on a per-pixel basis to remove cloudy pixels. And for the geometric distortion, the correction process were performed by the nearest neighbor resampling using 2nd-order polynomial obtained from the geolocation information of MODIS Data set. In order to correct the surface anisotropy effects, this paper attempted the semiempirical kernel-driven Bi- directional Reflectance Distribution Function(BRDF) model. The algorithm yields an inversion of the kernel-driven model to the angular components, such as viewing zenith angle, solar zenith angle, viewing azimuth angle, solar azimuth angle from reflectance observed by satellite. First we consider sets of the model observations comprised with a 31-day period to perform the BRDF model. In the next step, Nadir view reflectance normalization is carried out through the modification of the angular components, separated by BRDF model for each spectral band and each pixel. Modeled reflectance values show a good agreement with measured reflectance values and their RMSE(Root Mean Square Error) was totally about 0.01(maximum=0.03). Finally, we provide a normalized surface reflectance database consisted of 36 images for 2001 over Korea.