Scale Effects and Correction for Land Surface Albedo in Rugged Terrain

_{¹ State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, Jointly Sponsored by the Institute of Remote Sensing
Applications of Chinese Academy of Sciences and Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100101, China
² Beijing Research Institute of Uranium Geology, Beijing 100029, China
³ Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China}

Abstract. It is well known that influence of topography must be accounted when using high-resolution remote sensing data to estimate land surface reflectance or albedo in rugged  terrain. However, when moderate or low-resolution satellite remote sensing data are used, the topographic effects on albedo calculation are generally considered ignorable because  the slope of the low-resolution pixels are usually small. A potential problem is that  topographic effects within one low-resolution pixel have been omitted, which may cause error in albedo estimation. This problem comes from the scale effect in land surface albedo. This paper investigates in theory whether there is scale effect in land surface albedo when upscaling high-resolution surface albedo into low-resolution surface albedo in rugged terrain. Based on this analysis, we present the method to upscale high-resolution surace albedo to coarse  resolution, and finally derive a correction factor for land surface albedo derived from low-resolution remote sensing data. The method puts forward in this paper is a useful and effective method for scale correction of land surface albedo; and it’s also a good method to calculate albedo from low-resolution remote sensing data in rugged terrain.

Keywords: albedo, scale effect, rugged terrain, topographic effects

In: Wan, Y. et al. (eds) Proceeding of the 8th international symposium on spatial accuracy assessment in natural resources and environmental sciences, World Academic Union (Press).