Atmospheric effects on Landsat TM thermal IR data

The components of atmospherically attenuated target radiance and the path radiance emitted by the atmosphere are calculated to explain the fact that for certain meteorological conditions, properly calibrated thermal IR (infrared) data gathered from aircraft and spacecraft altitudes provide accurate temperature measurements of surface water bodies even when atmospheric corrections are not applied. Results show that although the 8-14-μm atmospheric window is far from being transparent (<50% transmission), the amount of atmospheric path radiance may be equal to the amount of attenuated target radiance. Errors in remotely sensed temperatures introduced by atmospheric effects are shown to be smaller than or of the same order of magnitude as those errors caused by sensor noise and the effects of applying a cubic convolution during the process of converting the TM (Thematic Mapper) data from A-tape to geometrically corrected P-tape data format