Atmospheric pre-corrected differential absorption techniques to retrieve columnar water vapor: Theory and simulations

Two different approaches exist to retrieve columnar water vapor from imaging spectrometer data: (1) Differential absorption techniques based on: (a) Narrow-Wide (N/W) ratio between overlapping spectrally wide and narrow channels (b) Continuum Interpolated Band Ratio (CIBR) between a measurement channel and the weighted sum of two reference channels; and (2) Non-linear fitting techniques which are based on spectral radiative transfer calculations. The advantage of the first approach is computational speed and of the second, improved retrieval accuracy. Our goal was to improve the accuracy of the first technique using physics based on radiative transfer. Using a modified version of the Duntley equation, we derived an {open_quote}Atmospheric Pre-corrected Differential Absorption{close_quote} (APDA) technique and described an iterative scheme to retrieve water vapor on a pixel-by-pixel basis. Next we compared both, the CIBR and the APDA using the Duntley equation for MODTRAN3 computed irradiances, transmissions and path radiance (using the DISORT option). This simulation showed that the CIBR is very sensitive to reflectance effects and that the APDA performs much better. An extensive data set was created with the radiative transfer code 6S over 379 different ground reflectance spectra. The calculated relative water vapor error was reduced significantly for the APDA. The APDA technique had about 8% (vs. over 35% for the CIBR) of the 379 spectra with a relative water vapor error of greater than {+-}5%. The APDA has been applied to 1991 and 1995 AVIRIS scenes which visually demonstrate the improvement over the CIBR technique