• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.31-45
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• 1995

The values of brightness temperature difference (BTD) between 11um and 12um infrared channels may reflect amounts of low-level water vapor and cloud types due to the different absorptivity for water vapor between two channels. A simple method of classifying cloud types at night was proposed. Two-dimensional histograms of brightness temperature of the 11um channel and the BTD between the split window data over subareas around characteristic clouds such as Cb(cumulonimbus), Ci(cirrus), and Sc(stratocumulus) was constructed. Cb, Ci and Sc can be classified by seleting appropriate thresholds in the two-dimensional histograms. And we can see amounts of low-level water vapor in clear area as well as cloud types in cloudy area in the BTD image. The map of cloud types and low-level water vapor generated by this method was compared with 850hPa and 1000hPa relative humidity(%) of numerical analysis data and nephanalysis chart. The comparisons showed reasonable agreement.

• Atmosphere
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.137-147
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• 2012

The technique of Brightness Temperature Difference (BTD) between 11 and $12{\mu}m$ separates yellow sand dust from clouds according to the difference in absorptive characteristics between the channels. However, this method causes consistent false alarms in many cases, especially over the desert. In order to reduce these false alarms, we should eliminate the background noise originated from surface. We adopted the Background BTD (BBTD), which stands for surface characteristics on clear sky condition without any dust or cloud. We took an average of brightness temperatures of 11 and $12{\mu}m$ channels during the previous 15 days from a target date and then calculated BTD of averaged ones to obtain decontaminated pixels from dust. After defining the BBTD, we subtracted this index from BTD for the Yellow Sand Index (YSI). In the previous study, this method was already verified using the geostationary satellite, MTSAT. In this study, we applied this to the polar orbiting satellite, MODIS, to detect yellow sand dust over Northeast Asia. Products of yellow sand dust from OMI and MTSAT were used to verify MODIS YSI. The coefficient of determination between MODIS YSI and MTSAT YSI was 0.61, and MODIS YSI and OMI AI was also 0.61. As a result of comparing two products, significantly enhanced signals of dust aerosols were detected by removing the false alarms over the desert. Furthermore, the discontinuity between land and ocean on BTD was removed. This was even effective on the case of fall. This study illustrates that the proposed algorithm can provide the reliable distribution of dust aerosols over the desert even at night.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.193-203
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• 2009

Snow cover is one of the important parameters since it determines surface energy balance and its variation. To classify snow and cloud from satellite data is very important process when inferring land surface information. Generally, misclassified cloud and snow pixel can lead directly to error factor for retrieval of surface products from satellite data. Therefore, in this study, we perform algorithm for detecting snow cover area with remote sensing data. We just utilize visible reflectance, and infrared channels rather than using NDSI (Normalized Difference Snow Index) which is one of optimized methods to detect snow cover. Because COMS MI (Meteorological Imager) channels doesn't include near infra-red, which is used to produce NDSI. Detecting snow cover with visible channel is well performed over clear sky area, but it is difficult to discriminate snow cover from mixed cloudy pixels. To improve those detecting abilities, brightness temperature difference (BTD) between 11 and 3.7 is used for snow detection. BTD method shows improved results than using only visible channel.