ATMOSPHERIC CORRECTION OF THE LANDSAT SATELLITE IMAGERY FOR TURBID WATERS

this paper describes methods 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 around korean peninsula. three atmospheric correction (ac) methods implemented and examined, using the toa radiance or reflectance data, are 6s radiative transfer model, spectral shape matching (ssmm) and path-extraction methods. the results show that overall shape and magnitude of radiance or reflectance spectra of the atmospherically corrected landsat vis/nir imagery by ssmm appears to have very 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 values for the black ocean pixels of the landsat vis/nir bands. because of the standard atmosphere with constant aerosols and models adopted in 6s model, a large error is possible between the retrieved and in-situ spectra. validation suggests that accurate the retrieval of water-leaving radiance is not feasible with the invalid assumption of classical ac algorithms, but is feasible with ssmm.