Directional Applicability Analysis of Albedo Retrieval Using Prior BRDF Knowledge

Surface albedo measures the proportion of incoming solar radiation reflected by the Earth’s surface. Accurate albedo retrieval from remote sensing data usually requires sufficient multi-angular observations to account for the surface reflectance anisotropy. However, most middle and high-resolution remote sensing satellites lack the capability to acquire sufficient multi-angular observations. Existing algorithms for retrieving surface albedo from single-direction reflectance typically rely on land cover types and vegetation indices to extract the corresponding prior knowledge of surface anisotropic reflectance from coarse-resolution Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) products. This study introduces an algorithm for retrieving albedo from directional reflectance based on a 3 × 3 BRDF archetype database established using the 2015 global time-series Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectro-radiometer (MODIS) BRDF product. For different directions, BRDF archetypes are applied to the simulated MODIS directional reflectance to retrieve albedo. By comparing the retrieved albedos with the MODIS albedo, the BRDF archetype that yields the smallest Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) is selected as the prior BRDF for the direction. A lookup table (LUT) that contains the optimal BRDF archetypes for albedo retrieval under various observational geometries is established. The impact of the number of BRDF archetypes on the accuracy of albedo is analyzed according to the 2020 MODIS BRDF. The LUT is applied to the MODIS BRDF within specific BRDF archetype classes to validate its applicability under different anisotropic reflectance characteristics. The applicability of the LUT across different data types is further evaluated using simulated reflectance or real multi-angular measurements. The results indicate that (1) for any direction, a specific BRDF archetype can retrieve a high-accuracy albedo from directional reflectance. The optimal BRDF archetype varies with the observation direction. (2) Compared to the prior BRDF knowledge obtained through averaging method, the BRDF archetype LUT based on the 3 × 3 BRDF archetype database can more accurately retrieve the surface albedo. (3) The BRDF archetype LUT effectively eliminates the influence of surface anisotropic reflectance characteristics in albedo retrieval across different scales and types of data.