Final Report: Assessing Post-Fire Recovery of Sagebrush-Steppe Rangelands in Southeastern Idaho

Correcting satellite imagery for atmospheric effects is a common procedure today. Indeed there are many techniques and software applications that offer atmospheric correction processes. This study compared several techniques (apparent reflectance, dark-object subtraction, Cos(t), and the full cost model) in both Idrisi and ENVI software to determine the level of similarity between resulting imagery and the interoperability of these data. In nearly all cases comparison of resulting imagery revealed no differences (r = 1.0). However, other results suggest that for a given project, all imagery should be corrected using the same technique within the same software application. Furthermore, use of full cost models should probably be avoided unless optical thickness and spectral diffuse sky irradiance parameters can be accurately computed and consistently applied. As an alternative, both Cos(t) and dark-object subtraction algorithms offer viable correction techniques that are well documented and appear to be robust and reliable.