| Summary: | Dissertation (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2002 The successful launch of the Terra satellite on December 18, 1999 opened a new era of earth observation from space. This thesis is motivated by the need for validation and promotion of the use of snow and sea ice products derived from MODIS, one of the main sensors aboard the Terra and Aqua satellites. Three cruises were made in the Southern Ocean, in the Ross, Amundsen and Bellingshausen seas. Measurements of all-wave albedo, spectral albedo, BRDF, snow surface temperature, snow grain size, and snow stratification etc. were carried out on pack ice floes and landfast ice. In situ measurements were also carried out concurrently with MODIS. The effect of snow physical parameters on the radiative quantities such as all-wave albedo, spectral albedo and bidirectional reflectance are studied using statistical techniques and radiative transfer modeling, including single scattering and multiple scattering. The whole thesis consists of six major parts. The first part (chapter 1) is a review of the present research work on the optical remote sensing of snow. The second part (chapter 2) describes the instrumentation and data-collection of ground measurements of all-wave albedo, spectral albedo and bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) of snow and sea ice in the visible-near-infrared (VNIR) domain in Western Antarctica. The third part (chapter 3) contains a detailed multivariate correlation and regression analysis of the measured radiative quantities with snow physical parameters such as snow density, surface temperature, single and composite grain size and number density. The fourth part (chapter 4) describes the validation of MODIS satellite data acquired concurrently with the ground measurements. The radiances collected by the MODIS sensor are converted to ground snow surface reflectances by removing the atmospheric effect using a radiative transfer algorithm (6S). Ground measured reflectance is corrected for ice concentration at the subpixel ...
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