The accurate method to eliminate the large component due to the atmospheric scatting is required to measure ocean colors quantitatively in the application of the remote sensing. The present atmospheric correction techniques proposed by Gordon et al. uses the “clear water concept” to determine the aerosol parameters. However the aerosol parameters of the blue band can not be determined directly from the clear water area but be calculated from the aerosol parameters of the other bands using the angstrom power law. Furthermore, this method can not be applied to the images without clear water area.
In this paper, a statistical method is proposed to overcome these problems. The method is based on the idea that the aerosol scattering pattern has no correlation with the ocean color pattern on the entire image or a part of image and this method determines automatically the aerosol characteristics over concerned area.
The method is applied to a sequence of CZCS imagery around Japan islands and the results are compared with those which are given by the “clear water” method. The wavelength dependency of aerosol parameters is also discussed. As the result, the statistical method can give proper aerosol parameters than the “clear water” method. Using the angstrom power low is not appropriate to determine aerosol characteristics around Japan islands.
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