'onment and 
L., Lewis, M.M., 
ons: theory for 
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1 Informatics. 6, 
International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XXXIX-B8, 2012 
XXII ISPRS Congress, 25 August — 01 September 2012, Melbourne, Australia 
OPERATIONAL OBSERVATION OF AUSTRALIAN BIOREGIONS WITH BANDS 8-19 
OF MODIS 
B. K. McAtee?^ *, M. Gray » M. Broomhall?, M. Lynch 5 P. Fearns? 
* Satellite Remote Sensing Services, Western Australian Land Information Authority (Landgate), Perth, Australia,- 
brendon.mcatee@landgate.wa.gov.au 
? Remote Sensing and Satellite Research Group, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia, (m.gray, m.broomhall, 
m.lynch, p.fearns)@curtin.edu.au 
Technical Commission VIII, WG VIII/8 
KEY WORDS: MODIS, Remote Sensing, Surface Reflectance, Bioregions, Australia 
ABSTRACT: 
Data from bands 1-7 are the most common bands of the MODIS instrument used for near-real time terrestrial earth observation 
operations in Australia. However, many of Australia's bioregions present unique scenarios which constitute a challenge for 
quantitative environmental remote sensing. We believe that data from MODIS bands 8-19 may provide significant benefit to Earth 
observation over particular bioregions of the Australian continent. Examples here include the use of band 8 in characterising aerosol 
optical depth over typically bright land surfaces and accounting for anomalous retrievals of atmospheric water vapour obtained using 
MODOS based on the abundance of Australia’s ‘red dirt’, which exhibits absorption features in the near infrared bands 17-19 of 
MODIS. Bioregion-focused applications such as those mentioned above have driven the development of automated processing, 
infrastructure for the atmospheric and BRDF correction of the first 19 bands of MODIS rather than only the first 7, which is more 
often the case. This work has been facilitated by the AusCover project which is the remote sensing component of the Terrestrial 
Ecosystem Research Network (TERN), itself a program designed to create a new generation of infrastructure for ecological study of 
the Australian landscape. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
1.1 Background 
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) 
was designed to improve the capability of satellite 
remote sensing to meet the needs of the global change science 
community (Justice, 1998). As well as addressing the global 
science requirements, the range of products provided by 
MODIS also find practical application within the areas of 
agricultural, natural resource and emergency services 
management, and increasingly within the ecological research 
community. 
This current work is part of the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research 
Network (TERN) AusCover Program (www.auscover.org.au) 
which seeks to expand the use of remotely sensed data within 
the ecological research community. Under the AusCover project 
an archive of remotely sensed products is being compiled on 
nationally linked, High Performance Computing (HPC) 
architecture across Australia. Other themes within TERN are 
building infrastructure for the analysis and synthesis of a myriad 
of ecological data sets and will integrate with the AusCover 
archive. 
In this paper we describe some of the MODIS processing and 
validation work being conducted under the AusCover project 
and describe selected applications of our work. 
1.2 Processing and Validation 
The MODIS processing component of this work is focused on 
the implementation of the Simple Method for Atmospheric 
  
* Corresponding author. 
Correction (SMAC) (Rahman and Dedieu, 1994) for bands 8-19 
of MODIS on the national HPC grid. It represents an extension 
to the operational MODIS processing system for bands 1-7 
described in McAtee and Maier (2009). The inspiration for this 
derives from our belief that the extra spectral information 
contained in these bands will benefit the atmospheric correction 
of MODIS, and follow-on sensors such as VIIRS, under 
conditions typical of continental Australia. 
We base the MODIS-derived, atmospherically corrected, 
surface reflectance validation component of this study firstly on 
in situ measurements of spectral reflectances collected using an 
Analytical Spectral Devices (ASD) spectroradiometer over 
spatial scales from 10m x 10m to 600m x 600m at a semi arid 
site near the town of Merredin in the Wheatbelt region of 
Western Australia. We are currently expanding this validation