A physical model is employed to simulate the planetary reflectance, considering different characteristic targets in a northeastern region of Brazil. The model simulates the signal detected by the sensor in a function of successive orders of interaction of the solar radiation with the earth-atmosphere system. A fairly accurate analytical expression of an uniform surface apparent reflectance is established. In this expression the effects of the gaseous absorption and the scattering by molecules and aerosols are included. The surface is assumed to have an uniform Lambertian reflectance. The atmosphere is considered as a mixture of air and aerosol. The 1st order approximation (single scattering) is used to determine the intrinsic mixture reflectance. For atmospheric aerosols, the two-term Henyey-Greenstein phase function is used. The atmosphere optical parameters (asymmetry factor, single scattering albedo, optical depth) were obtained from the literature, and the aerosol optical depth is evaluated using pyranometer data. The model is applied to simulate the TM signal of channels 1, 2, 3 and 4 of Landsat-5 for characteristic sites (lake, soil and vegetation). The results show that the atmospheric reflectance influence is dominant for low reflectance targets, even in the case of low values of aerosols optical depth. The opposite occurs in the case of medium reflectance targets where the predominant reflectance is that of the target.
Simulation model; Spectral Reflectance; Landsat-TM
