Atmospheric corrections for remotely-sensed thermal data in a cool humid temperate zone

This research emphasizes the necessity of carrying out atmospheric corrections in order to obtain accurate absolute temperature values for terrestrial objects, from remotely-sensed data. Satellite data were available for thermal band 6 on Landsat-5. They were complemented by simultaneously-acquired airborne and ground-truth data. Radiosonde data were fed into the computer program LOWTRAN 6. The ground-based data indicated that the use of the LOWTRAN 6 model applied to low-level airborne measurements was very satisfactory (variations of only 0·01-0·61 deg K being noted). However, for the satellite-borne detector the results were much less satisfactory (variations of 0·26-2·05 deg K), because of lower radiometric and spatial resolving power.