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Professional Paper 1386–A

Chapter A–2 (Figure 77)

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Figure 77.—Spectral bands that selected instruments on Earth-orbiting satellites record. The bandwidths of past, present, and experimental instruments are shown against the spectral-reflectance curves of bare glacier ice, coarse-grained snow, and fine-grained snow. The numbers in the gray boxes are band numbers of the electromaganetic spectrum. The Hyperion sensor records 220 bands between 0.4 μm and 2.5 μm; in the diagram the individual bands are not numbered. Instruments are abbreviated as: ASTER, Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and reflection Radiometer; ALI, Advanced Land Imager; ETM+, Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (Landsat 7); MISR, Multiangle Imaging SpectroRadiometer; MODIS, MODerate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (36 bands, of which 19 are relevant to discrimination of snow and ice); MSS, MultiSpectral Scanner (Landsats 1–3); and TM, Thematic Mapper (Landsats 4 and 5). Several of these instruments also have bands in the thermal infrared. Landsat bands 1 through 3 generally saturate over snow (Ferrigno and Williams, 1983), but ASTER bands, with their adjustable gains, were designed to avoid the saturation problem (Raup and others, 2007).

Figure 77. Spectral bands that selected instruments on Earth-orbiting satellites record. The bandwidths of past, present, and experimental instruments are shown against the spectral-reflectance curves of bare glacier ice, coarse-grained snow, and fine-grained snow. The numbers in the gray boxes are band numbers of the electromaganetic spectrum. The Hyperion sensor records 220 bands between 0.4 μm and 2.5 μm; in the diagram the individual bands are not numbered. Instruments are abbreviated as: ASTER, Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and reflection Radiometer; ALI, Advanced Land Imager; ETM+, Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (Landsat 7); MISR, Multiangle Imaging SpectroRadiometer; MODIS, MODerate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (36 bands, of which 19 are relevant to discrimination of snow and ice); MSS, MultiSpectral Scanner (Landsats 1–3); and TM, Thematic Mapper (Landsats 4 and 5). Several of these instruments also have bands in the thermal infrared. Landsat bands 1 through 3 generally saturate over snow (Ferrigno and Williams, 1983), but ASTER bands, with their adjustable gains, were designed to avoid the saturation problem (Raup and others, 2007).



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