Measurement and modeling of longwave infrared directional downwelling spectral radiance

Exploitation of longwave infrared hyperspectral imagery often requires atmospheric compensation in order to retrieve intrinsic material emissivity properties. For materials possessing subtle spectral features and those with lower emissivity, downwelling radiance plays an important role in the atmospheric compensation process. Most atmospheric compensation algorithms use an estimate of the total downwelling radiance integrated over the hemisphere. However, for tilted surfaces and non-nadir imaging scenarios, directional downwelling radiance information may be required. This work examines collection of directional downwelling radiance measurements using a Fourier transform infrared spectrometer. Specifically, work is done to determine a minimum number of sky angles to measure for which the remainder of the directional sky measurements can be estimated with minimal error through the use of simple data fitting models.