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W. Dorigo, R. Richter, T. Schneider, M. Schaepman, A. Müller, W. Wagner:
"Assessing The Influence Of Spectral Band Configuration On Automated Radiative Transfer Model Inversion";
Talk: 6th EARSeL SIG IS workshop on Imaging Spectroscopy: Innovative tool for scientific and commercial environmental applications, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel; 2009-03-16 - 2009-03-19; in: "Proceedings", (2009), 7 pages.

The success of radiative transfer model (RTM) inversion strongly depends on various factors, including the choice of a
suited radiative transfer model, the followed inversion strategy, and the band configuration of the remote sensing system.
Current study aims at addressing the latter, by investigating the influence of band configuration on the automated
CRASh RTM inversion approach (Dorigo et al., 2008) which is based on PROSPECT and SAILh. The tested band
combinations included the configurations of two commonly used hyperspectral (HyMap, CHRIS) and three
multispectral (Landsat ETM+, SPOT HRV, Quickbird) sensors which, apart from the number of bands, greatly differ in
the covered spectral range. For the comparison study, reflectance data were taken with an ASD Fieldspec PRO FR field
spectrometer at various intensively managed grasslands in southern Germany, and measured spectra were resampled to
the five studied band configurations. Leaf area index, leaf water content, and leaf dry matter content were determined for
validation purposes.
Most accurate inversion results were obtained for the full-range, hyperspectral HyMap configuration,
shortly followed by the multispectral Landsat ETM+ configuration and at some distance by the SPOT configuration. For
the studied variables, CHRIS and Quickbird configurations provided clearly less accurate results. The obtained results
indicate that an even distribution of nearly uncorrelated bands across the entire solar-reflective domain contributes more
heavily to a robust inversion than a high absolute number of bands in strongly correlating waveband regions, such as
provided by CHRIS. The inclusion of SWIR bands led to regularization of the leaf water retrievals and hence to
stabilization of the complete inversion process. The results in this study obtained from measured data may provide an
important contribution to sensor development studies, which are often based only on simulated data.

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_181551.pdf