Satellite observations allow for the synoptic observation of large areas of the globe. Remote sensing observations performed in the visible and near infrared (e.g. Meris, MODIS, AVHHR) have wide application in marine, land and snow/ice related climate studies serving as both primary and secondary sources of information. However, although there is significant value in the analysis of data from individual sensors, any global observing system and in particular studies requiring different spatial resolutions and long time bases require accurate knowledge of sensor to sensor biases. This requires the responsivities of all optical radiometers operated in space to be intercompared and traceable to a common reference standard. CEOS (Committee on Earth Observing Satellites) has established a number of Earth targets to serve as international reference standards, each being, or to be, well characterized by surface based in-situ measurements. The reflectance of natural surfaces is not isotropic. The reflectance varies with the illumination and viewing geometries, and consequently impacts satellite observations. Thus the bi-directional reflectance (BRDF) of natural surfaces is a pre- requisite for use of satellite data. Antartic Snow is a strong potential calibration target.
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Staff:
Research students:
Joint project with NERC FSF (Edinburgh), NPL (Teddington) and PNRS(Italy)
Funding: NERC,RHUL,PNRA.
Links:MDK personal page - http://eswww.rhul.ac.uk/~king/work/Home.html