ALG Product Description
Atmospheric look-up tables made easy
Atmospheric Radiative Transfer models (RTMs) have become important tools for the analysis and processing of optical Earth observation data,
providing meaningful links between radiometry and atmospheric composition for applications, such as aerosol radiative forcing, air quality, and atmospheric correction.
However, the complexity of these RTMs limit their use and applicability for the broader scientific community.
The Atmospheric Look-up table Generator (ALG) toolbox is a standalone software package that can be use independently of ARTMO.
ALG allows generating and analyzing look-up tables (LUT) based on a suite of atmospheric RTMs, facilitating consistent and intuitive user interaction,
thereby streamlining model setup, running and storing RTM data for any spectral configuration in the optical domain.
Key Features
- Configure and run atmospheric RTMs in an intuitive way through a single graphical user interface with input options to insert single values or value ranges.
This includes the definition of multiple combinations of key input atmospheric (e.g., aerosol-related, gas concentration profiles, clouds) and geometric (e.g., sensor height, surface height, illumination/viewing angles) variables.
- Couple atmospheric RTMs with the OPAC aerosol database.
- Set the spectral range and resolution of the output RTM data at non-contiguous spectral intervals.
- Run efficiently parallel executions of multiple instances of an atmospheric RTM as a third-party software.
- Process and store a massive quantity of spectral output data based on a LUT approach in a relational database.
Applications
The broader scientific community can subsequently use ALG for a wide variety of applications such as:
- Atmospheric correction: ALG facilitates users to generate and operate atmospheric LUTs, which can be used for a physically-based atmospheric correction of satellite passive optical instruments
(Cooley et al., 2002, Richter et al.,2002,
Guanter et al., 2007, North et al., 2008).
- Cross-comparison of atmospheric RTMs: The modular design of the ALG tool allows including additional atmospheric RTMs, which facilitates the cross-comparison of various atmospheric RTMs.
(Kotchenova et al., 2008, Seidel et al., 2010, Callieco et al., 2011)
- Forward simulation: The generation of synthetic satellite data has been an active research field since the late 80s (Kerekes et al., 1989).
The generation of synthetic top-of-atmosphere radiance scenes play an important role to assess a satellite mission performance (Dangel et al., 2003, Segl et al., 2012,
Tenjo et al., 2017, Vicent et al., 2016).
Through its datasets, ALG can extend the current simulation capabilities of satellite mission simulators to generate synthetic scenes in a large variety of atmospheric conditions.
In combination with satellite mission simulators, ALG would allow scientists and engineers validating and optimizing satellite data processing schemes.
- Sensitivity analysis: In combination with ARTMO's Gobal Sensitivity Analysis toolbox, ALG atmospheric LUTs can be used to identify the most influential atmospheric variables
affecting satellite radiance data (Verrelst et al., 2016, Vicent et al., 2017), which would serve as a tool to design new passive optical instruments.