International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XXXIX-B7, 2012 
XXII ISPRS Congress, 25 August — 01 September 2012, Melbourne, Australia 
    
ALBEDO PATTERN RECOGNITION AND TIME-SERIES ANALYSES IN MALAYSIA 
S. A. Salleh ?, Z. Abd Latif * *, W. M. N. Wan Mohd *, A. Chan? 
* Center for Surveying Science and Geomatics Studies, Faculty of Architecture Planning and Surveying, 
Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), 40450 Shah Alam, Selangor, Malaysia. 
? Faculty of Engineering, University of Nottingham, Campus Semenyih, Jalan Broga, Selangor, Malaysia 
zulki721 Q salam.uitm.edu.my 
Commission VII, WG VII/A 
KEY WORDS: Environment, Temporal, Pattern, Spatial, Meteorology, Climate 
ABSTRACT: 
Pattern recognition and time-series analyses will enable one to evaluate and generate predictions of specific phenomena. The albedo 
pattern and time-series analyses are very much useful especially in relation to climate condition monitoring. This study is conducted 
to seek for Malaysia albedo pattern changes. The pattern recognition and changes will be useful for variety of environmental and 
climate monitoring researches such as carbon budgeting and aerosol mapping. The 10 years (2000-2009) MODIS satellite images 
were used for the analyses and interpretation. These images were being processed using ERDAS Imagine remote sensing software, 
ArcGIS 9.3, the 6S code for atmospherical calibration and several MODIS tools (MRT, HDF2GIS, Albedo tools). There are several 
methods for time-series analyses were explored, this paper demonstrates trends and seasonal time-series analyses using converted 
HDF format MODIS MCD43A3 albedo land product. The results revealed significance changes of albedo percentages over the past 
10 years and the pattern with regards to Malaysia's nebulosity index (NI) and aerosol optical depth (AOD). There is noticeable trend 
can be identified with regards to its maximum and minimum value of the albedo. The rise and fall of the line graph show a similar 
trend with regards to its daily observation. The different can be identified in term of the value or percentage of rises and falls of 
albedo. Thus, it can be concludes that the temporal behavior of land surface albedo in Malaysia have a uniform behaviours and 
effects with regards to the local monsoons. However, although the average albedo shows linear trend with nebulosity index, the 
pattern changes of albedo with respects to the nebulosity index indicates that there are external factors that implicates the albedo 
values, as the sky conditions and its diffusion plotted does not have uniform trend over the years, especially when the trend of 5 
years interval is examined, 2000 shows high negative linear trend relationship (R2 7 0.8017), while in 2005 the R? is 0.4428 of 
positive linear trend relationship and in 2009 its negative relationship has remarkably change when the R? is 0.9663 according to the 
second order polynomial trend line. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
1.1 Albedo Pattern for Environmental and Climate 
Condition 
The study of land surface albedo and its inter-dependences 
towards global climate condition have been conducted by 
several researchers i.e (Zhou et al. 2003), (Akbari et al. 2009), 
(Govaerts and Lattanzio 2008) and (Ollinger et al. 2008). Liu, 
Schaaf et al. (2009) quoted definition of albedo from Dickinson 
(1978) as "Land surface albedo is defined as the fraction of 
incident solar irradiance reflected by Earth's surface over the 
whole solar spectrum". It can simply be defined as the amount 
of incoming radiation that is reflected from the surface. 
Land surface albedo plays a significant role in determining and 
controlling the energy budget. Researchers has been studying it 
properties through its dependency on solar zenith angle as to 
validate the source of image dataset (Liu et al. 20092), the 
correlation of radiative forcing and landuse (Kvalevag 2009; 
Kvaleväg et al. 2010; Nair et al. 2007) and improvement or 
downscaling its data spatial resolution to enable higher 
accuracy and more details results for study involving 
microclimate condition (Liu et al. 2009b; Liu et al. 2007; M 
ttus and Rautiainen 2009; Nasipuri et al. 2006; Rocchini 2007). 
  
* Corresponding author. 
Remote sensing and GIS technology certainly give advantages 
to allow bigger coverage data retrieval and huge data mining 
purposes. There are several studies in relation to albedo that 
have utilized these technologies. Satellite derived albedo such as 
Meteosat was used in several researches to seek for 
discrepancies through documenting the time-series data and 
analysis (Loew and Govaerts 2010), identification of spatial and 
temporal distribution of aerosol (Pinty et al. 2000), and drought 
events (Govaerts and Lattanzio 2008). (Pinty et al. 2000) used 
10 years of Meteosat datasets and has underlined the 
opportunity to document the changes and subsequently enable 
one to monitor land surface dynamics. 
Landsat image was also being used for monitoring earth albedo 
and study of vegetation indices relationship with surface 
roughness (Kiang and Ungar 1977; Yunjun et al. 2008). While 
Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) have 
been through numerous verification and validation studies (Liu 
et al. 2009a; Lucht et al. 2000; Stroeve et al. 2005), AVHRR 
and GOES was used to retrieve red spectral albedo and 
bidirectional reflectance (d'Entremont et al. 1999). A 
comprehensive datasets with viable temporal resolution where 
the data is being observed in a sequence of time enable a 
domain of statistical analyses known as time-series analysis.