Improvement of a Cirrus Correction Empirical Method with Sentinel-2 Data

The atmospheric correction of remote sensing data in the reflective domain is today very well controlled under clear sky conditions. However, cirrus clouds represent 2/3 of the global terrestrial cover, making several images unusable. Gao and Li [5] proposed an empirical method of thin cirrus correction. The method shows very good results on dark surfaces but presents bias higher than 0.02 when the surface becomes too reflective and the cirrus too thick. In addition, it only corrects for the upwelling path [7]. Simulations show that the presence of cirrus on the sun-to-ground path has a significant influence on the received signal and must also be corrected. This paper shows that considering the transmission term of the cirrus of the upwelling and downwelling paths improves the results in the red-edge but also the SWIR, with an RMSE divided by 2.