Ruyin Cao, Xuehong Chen, Jin Chen, Wei Yang

State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China

Abstract: The Fraunhofer line discriminator (FLD) principle applied on the atmospheric oxygen absorption feature around 761 nm (O₂-A band) has been widely used to retrieve solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (F_s) from remotely sensed data. In this letter, however, we address a violation of the basic assumption caused by O₂ absorption feature changes, and we evaluate the impact of diminishing O₂ absorption with the increase in ground altitude on F_s retrieval accuracy. The F_s retrieval accuracy substantially decreases in higher ground altitude areas for the standard FLD and three-band FLD methods, in which relative estimation errors increase approximately 70%–80% and 10%–16%, respectively, with an increase in ground altitude from 0.01 to 4.5 km. However, this increasing trend in F_s retrieval error does not occur with the use of the improved FLD (iFLD) method, which exhibits smaller than 5% of changes in relative estimation errors. Analytical analyses reveal the causes of the changes in F_s retrieval accuracy by the three methods. Based on these findings, the iFLD method is recommended to be used in cross-altitude studies or for F_s estimation in higher ground altitude areas under conditions of low radiometric noise, although its high sensitivity to noise should be taken into account. The investigations in this letter further indicate that the impact of ground altitude should be included in the uncertainty budgets of F_s retrievals and should be considered in the interpretation of F_s signals at the O₂-A absorption feature.

 

Keywords: Chlorophyll fluorescence; FluorMOD; Fraunhofer line discriminator (FLD); ground altitude; O₂-A band; photosynthesis.

 

Published in IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters. 2013, DOI: 10.1109/LGRS.2013.2262106.