Atmospheric corrections in the thermal infrared: global and water vapor dependent split-window algorithms-applications to ATSR and AVHRR data

The split-window method is an appropriate way to perform atmospheric corrections of satellite brightness temperatures in order to retrieve the surface temperature. A climatological data set of 1761 different radio soundings, the TIGR database, has been used to develop two different split-window methods. A global quadratic (QUAD) method, with global coefficients to be applied on a worldwide scale, and a water vapor dependent (WVD) algorithm. The first method includes a quadratic term in the split-window equation that roughly accounts for the water vapor amount. The other method explicitly includes the water vapor amount in each split-window coefficient. When applied to the 1761 radio soundings, the latter method gives better results than the global one, especially when the surface emissivity is far from unity (0.95 or less) and when the water vapor reaches great values. Both algorithms have been tested on ATSR/ERSI and AVHRR/NOAA data over sea pixels. The QUAD algorithm gives correct results for simulations (the standard error is 0.2 K) and experimental data (the bias ranges from -0.1 to 0.4 K). The WVD algorithm appears to be more accurate for both simulations (the standard error is less than 0.1 K) and AVHRR experimental data when climatological water vapor contents are used (the bias ranges from -0.2 to 0.1 K).