Anisotropy parameterization development and evaluation for glacier surface albedo retrieval from satellite observations.

Ren, S.; Miles, E.S.; Jia, L.; Menenti, M.; Kneib, M.; Buri, P.; McCarthy, Michael ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8099-0531; Shaw, T.E.; Yang, W.; Pellicciotti, F.. 2021 Anisotropy parameterization development and evaluation for glacier surface albedo retrieval from satellite observations. [in special issue: Remote Sensing in Glaciology and Cryosphere Research] Remote Sensing, 13 (9), 1714. 28, pp. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13091714

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Text (Open Access) Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) remotesensing-13-01714-v3.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Download (12MB) | Preview

Abstract/Summary

Glacier albedo determines the net shortwave radiation absorbed at the glacier surface and plays a crucial role in glacier energy and mass balance. Remote sensing techniques are efficient means to retrieve glacier surface albedo over large and inaccessible areas and to study its variability. However, corrections of anisotropic reflectance of glacier surface have been established for specific shortwave bands only, such as Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (L5/TM) band 2 and band 4, which is a major limitation of current retrievals of glacier broadband albedo. In this study, we calibrated and evaluated four anisotropy correction models for glacier snow and ice, applicable to visible, near-infrared and shortwave-infrared wavelengths using airborne datasets of Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF). We then tested the ability of the best-performing anisotropy correction model, referred to from here on as the ‘updated model’, to retrieve albedo from L5/TM, Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (L8/OLI) and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) imagery, and evaluated these results with field measurements collected on eight glaciers around the world. Our results show that the updated model: (1) can accurately estimate anisotropic factors of reflectance for snow and ice surfaces; (2) generally performs better than prior approaches for L8/OLI albedo retrieval but is not appropriate for L5/TM; (3) generally retrieves MODIS albedo better than the MODIS standard albedo product (MCD43A3) in both absolute values and glacier albedo temporal evolution, i.e., exhibiting both fewer gaps and better agreement with field observations. As the updated model enables anisotropy correction of a maximum of 10 multispectral bands and is implemented in Google Earth Engine (GEE), it is promising for observing and analyzing glacier albedo at large spatial scales.

Item Type:	Publication - Article
Digital Object Identifier (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13091714
ISSN:	2072-4292
Additional Keywords:	glacier surface albedo; anisotropy correction; albedo retrieval; remote sensing
Date made live:	28 May 2021 07:54 +0 (UTC)
URI:	https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/530412

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