Bidirectional Reflectances of Three Soil Surfaces and Their Characterization through Model Inversion

Date

1989-07

Department

Program

Citation of Original Publication

Deering, D.W., T.F. Eck, and J. Otterman. “Bidirectional Reflectances of Three Soil Surfaces and Their Characterization through Model Inversion.” 12th Canadian Symposium on Remote Sensing Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2 (July 1989): 670–73. https://doi.org/10.1109/IGARSS.1989.578904.

Rights

This work was written as part of one of the author's official duties as an Employee of the United States Government and is therefore a work of the United States Government. In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 105, no copyright protection is available for such works under U.S. Law.
Public Domain

Abstract

Spectral bidirectional reflectances were measured over three natural soil sites using a specially designed radiometer called the PARABOLA. TWo of the sites were bare soils and the third had a sparse cover of desert scrub. The reflectances were strongly non­ Lambertian for all three surfaces but with markedly different patterns. The measured data were fitted with a quasi-physical reflectance model in which the surface back­ scattering and forwardscattering are separately formulated. A soil reflectance characterization was obtained by assessing the contributions of the forward, -backward and Lambertian components. This three-parameter characterization produced a satisfactory fit to the measured reflectances, and appears promising to provide a basis for soils categorization.