For the purpose of establishing a vicarious calibration method to relate output digital numbers to surface radiance, an algorithm of reflectance-based method in the visible to near infrared region at the snow field was developed using a field measurement technique and radiative transfer code with the doubling-adding method. In this algorithm, most of the input parameters can be obtained from the field measurements, but some atmospheric parameters need to be calculated from the molecular and aerosol models. In this study, the vicarious calibration for Landsat Thematic Mapper was carried out at the Sarobetsu area in Hokkaido using the proposed algorithm. The calibration coefficients obtained from this vicarious calibration was nearly equal to ones.after 1987 which were reported in previous papers. This algorithm has enough potential as a vicarious calibration based on reflectance-based method with 5% error.
