Retrieval of Coastal Water Information from Landsat MSS Data

In recent years an inverse problem of determining optical parameters of air-water system from the remotely sensed spectral radiance of water has deserved much attention in the field of environmental monitoring. Particularly, optimization approach to the inference of optical properties of subsurface water from the measurements of multispectral scanner data of the sea has been developed analytically and computationally. In the present paper, making use of the invariant imbedding, an initial-value solution of the transfer equation in air-water system with allowance for the interaction of radiation at the system j,nterface is provided. The Cauchy system of the scattering function under consideration requires much computational works. In order to make tractable the inverse solution, we introduce the effective water surface albedo into the Cauchy system of the scattering function for the specular reflection problem, allowing for the multiple scattering effect of radiation in the water. Then, the least squares estimation of the effective water surface albedo from the noisy measurements of the total spectral radiance of water from space is made via the quasilinearization. The nemerical experiments showed rapid cOnvergence of the desired results. Based on these data, aqueous optical properties such as chlorophyll concentration and turbidity will be discussed in our subsequent papers.