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Airborne measurements of surface albedo and leaf area index of snow-covered boreal forest
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  • Terhikki Manninen,
  • Jean-Louis Roujean,
  • Olivier Hautecoeur,
  • Aku Riihelä,
  • Panu Lahtinen,
  • Emmihenna Jääskeläinen,
  • Niilo Siljamo,
  • Kati Anttila,
  • Timo Sukuvaara,
  • Lauri Korhonen
Terhikki Manninen
Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helsinki

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Jean-Louis Roujean
CESBIO
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Olivier Hautecoeur
Exostaff GmbH/EUMETSAT
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Aku Riihelä
Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helsinki
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Panu Lahtinen
Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helsinki
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Emmihenna Jääskeläinen
Finnish Meteorological Institute
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Niilo Siljamo
Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helsinki
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Kati Anttila
Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helsinki
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Timo Sukuvaara
Finnish Meteorological Institute
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Lauri Korhonen
University of Estern Finland
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Abstract

Helicopter based simultaneous measurements of broadband surface albedo and the effective leaf area index (LAIeff) were carried out in subarctic area of Finnish Lapland in spring 2008, 2009 and 2010 under varying illumination and snow cover conditions. Vertical profile measurements show that the found relationship between albedo and LAIeff seems to be rather independent of the flight altitude and therefore the footprint scale. Actually, flights above 500 m in altitude revealed low variations of the surface albedo approaching an aerial average at 1 km, meaning that a footprint of 20 km is representative of the landscape. The albedo was in the area beta distributed and without LAIeff values below 0.25 the average albedo value of the area would decrease from 0.49 to 0.44 showing the albedo sensitivity to sparse vegetation. The results agreed with the photon recollision probability based model PARAS and the MODIS satellite albedo product MCD43A3. However, differences between satellite based and airborne albedo values were noticed, which could be explained by a difference in footprint size and/or the strong local heterogeneity as certain flights were operated on specific targets.
16 Jan 2022Published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres volume 127 issue 1. 10.1029/2021JD035376