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Last Post 29 Aug 2012 08:54 AM by  anon
Clouds and atmospheric correction
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anon



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29 Aug 2012 08:54 AM
    Hi there, I have a few Landsat images (ETM+ and TM) which I want to use for landcover classifications. At the moment, I am trying to atmospherically correct them using the FLAASH module, but I have a few questions about the process. Firstly, a couple of my images have some thick white clouds (not a lot, and not in my area of interest) - will these affect the outcome of the atmospheric correction, and should I try to mask them or remove them prior to carrying out the atmospheric correction in FLAASH? I have noticed that the corrected images differ between those which have cloud and those which haven’t even though they are from similar time periods, so I wonder if it has something to do with the presence of clouds. Alternatively, should I clip the image to a smaller area of interest, which would get rid of many of these clouds from the image before I do my atmospheric correction? As a related question, I have seen in the guidance that FLAASH should provide a “cloud map” output file, but this has not been produced by FLAASH when I have run it on my images – does this depend on a specific setting within the FLAASH module? When I have previously carried out atmospheric correction of Landsat images using the ATCOR module, it did a good job removing light cloud/haze from my images, but the FLAASH module doesn’t seem to be getting rid of this at all, so I wonder if I am making some sort of error. Any advice would be much appreciated! Thanks. Nicola

    MariM



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    29 Aug 2012 10:01 AM
    The cloud map is only produced when a water retrieval is performed. Since Landsat does not have adequate spectral coverage for a water retrieval, there will be no cloud map. FLAASH performs a correction on a pixel-by-pixel basis (with some averaged values used for multispectral data), so the clouds should not strongly affect the overall results. A cloud map can improve the adjacency correction and visibility estimate. This may be the difference you are seeing in your cloudy vs less-cloudy images. What sort of differences are you seeing? What exactly are 'similar time periods'? The atmospheric conditions can change quite a bit in a short period of time and since there are many clouds in one image, it sounds like it has. Since you are unable to perform a water retrieval with Landsat, the modeled reflectance could be somewhat different. You could try subsetting or masking the clouds, which would just leave behind blank pixels in your image. I would not expect a large difference in the results.

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    31 Aug 2012 02:38 AM
    Dear MariM, Thanks for the reply. The different images were approximately 1 month apart, so of course the atmospheric conditions would be very different. The differences are that one image (the one with less clouds) ends up looking brighter than the other (in comparison with an atmospheric correction of 2 ASTER images where they ended up looking very similar), but having read your response my mind has been put at ease that I am not doing anything wrong! I am going to use the two images to "destripe" the SLC failure on Landsat images, so I wanted to make sure that I hadn't done anything wrong before going ahead with this. Thanks again!
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