This paper is a part of developing a software that predicts surface emitted radiance from ground objects by considering solar irradiation and atmospheric convection. The radiance emitted from a surface can be calculated by using the temperature and optical characteristics of the surface together with the spectral atmospheric transmittance. The thermal modeling is essential for identifying objects on the scenes obtained from the satellites. And the temperature distribution on the object is used to obtain their infrared images in contrast to the background. We considered the composite heat transfer modes including conduction, convection and spectral solar radiation for objects within a scene to calculate the surface temperature distribution. The software developed in this study could be used to model the thermal energy balance to obtain the temperature distribution over the object by considering the direct and diffuse solar irradiances and by assuming the conduction within the object as one-dimensional heat transfer into the depth. LOWTRAN7 are used to model the spectral solar radiation including the direct and diffuse solar energy components. The object considered is assumed to be consisted of several different materials with different properties, such as conductivity, absorptivity, density, and specific heat etc. Resulting spectral radiances in the MWIR region arrived at the sensor are shown to be strongly dependent on the spectral surface properties of the objects.

Date Published: 24 October 2007
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 6748, Image and Signal Processing for Remote Sensing XIII, 67481N (24 October 2007); doi: 10.1117/12.738982

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6748:
Image and Signal Processing for Remote Sensing XIII
Lorenzo Bruzzone, Editor(s)