Determination of the shortwave anisotropic function for clear-sky desert scenes from Meteosat data

Determination of planetary albedo on the basis of satellite observations of reflected shortwave (SW) radiances requires taking into account the anisotropic (non-Lambertian) reflectance properties of the earth-atmosphere system, depending both on the cloud cover and the nature of the underlying surface. One approach frequently used has been to represent these properties by a limited set of normalized bidirectional reflectance functions (BDRF) for different scene types. Here the authors consider, for clear-sky desert areas, the improvements that can be made using data from the geostationary satellite Meteosat, which samples all solar zenith angles that occur. -from Authors