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Atmospheric correction without external tool


winash12

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I believe my earlier question on another topic was misunderstood. I want to be able to use landsat 8 OLI images and then perform atmospheric correction. I do not want to use ENVI or 6S  or any other software out there.

 

I want the conceptual understanding of atmospheric correction so that I can implement this in my language of choice i.e. Java or C++

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Gotcha.  Unless you are an atmospheric scientist, or have a true grasp on atmospheric science, I would not attempt trying to program complex physical based models such as 6S or MODTRAN.  Eric Vermote has dedicated his research career to 6S.

 

Instead, I would recommend something like a scene-based model like cos(t), Chavez 1996.  Easily programmable and implemented, and produces good results.  Calibrate to TOA radiance, then to planetary reflectance, then apply cos(t).  

 

http://info.asprs.org/publications/pers/96journal/september/1996_sep_1025-1036.pdf

 

http://earth.gis.usu.edu/imagestd/ (example code with equations).

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The quick answer to "conceptual understanding of atmospheric correction" is attempting to quantify atmospheric contributions to at-satellite radiance, or top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiance. These atmospheric contributions include scattering, absorbing, refraction and transmission of light. Once you have modeled these properties of atmospheric attenuation, you remove them from the imagery (using the code you have programmed) to derive surface reflectance.

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Yes, the MTL.txt file contains all of the metadata that you need to duplicate the examples of cos(t) that I provided. You will find both gain and offset calibration factors to convert DN to either TOA radiance or TOA reflectance. You will also fin Sun Elevation to calculate the sun angle and you will find the Julian day to calculate Sun-Earth distance (d). Follow this user guide (second section) to understand how to convert data to TOA reflectance. http://landsat.usgs.gov/Landsat8_Using_Product.php

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Here's the order of your workflow.  Geometric correction should not be necessary if you are using Level-1 Terrain Corrected Landsat-8 data (L1T).  These GeoTIFF data bands  come precision terrain corrected and geo-registered so that step is already complete.  You will be performing the radiometric correction when you calibrate the data to at-sensor or top-of-atmosphere (TOA) surface reflectance.  The calibration coefficients are found in the *_MTL.txt metedata file.  After the data are in TOA reflectance, you then apply the cos(t) atmospheric correction algorithm.  Think of Cos(t) as an extension of dark object subtraction (DOS).  DOS alone does not account for transmittance; the (t) in cos(t) is the multiplicative factor used to estimate this atmospheric transmittance by taking in account solar zenith.

 

  • t = Atmospheric Transmittance expressed as formula_t.gif

 

Solar zenith is calculated from the sun elevation data found in the metadata file, where Theta is sun elevation.

 

I'm not sure which programming language you plan to use, but I have this algorithm coded in IDL.  The code parses the metadata to extract the relevant information, applies the gain/offset to calibrate (essentially a linear regression), and performs cos(t) in a batch process.  I'm happy to share if you wish.

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