Introduction to Radiative Transfer

Wouter Verhoef started working in remote sensing in 1973 at NIWARS, Delft, Netherlands, in a 4-year field reflectance spectroscopy measurement programme and moved to the National Aerospace Laboratory NLR in 1977, where he worked on image processing and optical remote sensing of vegetation canopies. He developed the well-known and widely used SAIL canopy reflectance model, as well as several other methodologies and algorithms for the processing of remotely sensed data, including data compression and time series analysis software. He participated in several ESA contracts dedicated to future satellite missions like SPECTRA (cancelled) and FLEX. He initiated and co-developed the now widely-used model SCOPE, integrating canopy radiative transfer with photosynthesis and the energy balance. He was a member of ESA’s FLEX Mission Advisory Groups from 2006 until 2015. From 2006 until 2016 he was a professor at the University of Twente. Until 2023 he was a regular reviewer for high-impact scientific journals like “Remote Sensing of Environment”, and several IEEE journals. Feng Zhao is currently an Associate Professor with Beihang University, Beijing. His research interests include 3D radiative transfer in vegetation and atmosphere, solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF), and quantitative remote sensing modelling and applications. Based on the Monte Carlo ray-tracing method, he developed the Weighted Photon Spread (WPS) model to simulate the non-fluorescent and SIF radiance received by sensors at levels from top-of canopy (TOC) to top-of-atmosphere (TOA) in a coherent manner. He proposed series fluorescence spectrum reconstruction methods to retrieve the SIF spectrum for hyper-spectral radiation measurements at levels from TOC to TOA. He is on the Editorial Board of “Remote Sensing of Environment”.

• Part I Basic Radiative Transfer Theory1. Introduction2. Fundamentals, basic concepts3. Radiative Transfer Equation （ RTE）4. Solutions for the Radiative Transfer EquationPart II Advanced Radiative Transfer Modelling and Application Topics5. Vegetation radiative transfer modelling6. Coupled surface - atmosphere modelling7. Atmospheric correction8. Radiative Transfer Modelling for soils and water bodies9. Vegetation RT modelling for SIF and thermal emission10. Integrated modelling of soil-canopy spectral radiances, photosynthesis, fluorescence, temperature and energy balance11. The inverse radiative transfer problem