CLOUD SCREENING AND MULTITEMPORAL UNMIXING OF MERIS FR DATA

The operational use of MERIS images can be ham-pered by the presence of clouds. This work presents a cloud screening algorithm that takes advantage of the high spectral and radiometric resolutions of MERIS and the specific location of some of its bands to increase the cloud detection accuracy. Moreover, the proposed algorithm provides a per-pixel proba-bilistic map of cloud abundance rather than a bi-nary cloud presence flag. In order to test the pro-posed algorithm we propose a cloud screening valida-tion method based on temporal series. In addition, we evaluate the impact of the cloud screening in a multitemporal unmixing application, where a tem-poral series of MERIS FR images acquired over The Netherlands is used to derive sub-pixel land cover composition by means of linear unmixing techniques. Key words: MERIS, multispectral images, cloud screening, spectral unmixing, sub-pixel classification