Atmospheric Precorrected Differential Absorption Technique to Retrieve Columnar Water Vapor

Differential absorption techniques are suitable to retrieve the total column water vapor contents from imaging spectroscopy data. A technique called Atmospheric Precorrected Differential Absorption (APDA) is derived directly from simplified radiative transfer equations. It combines a partial atmospheric correction with a differential absorption technique. The atmospheric path radiance term is iteratively corrected during the retrieval of water vapor. This improves the results especially over low background albedos. The error of the method for various ground reflectance spectra is below 7% for most of the spectra. The channel combinations for two test cases are then defined, using a quantitative procedure, which is based on MODTRAN simulations and the image itself. An error analysis indicates that the influence of aerosols and channel calibration is minimal. The APDA technique is then applied to two AVIRIS images acquired in 1991 and 1995. The accuracy of the measured water vapor columns is within a range of ±5% compared to ground truth radiosonde data.