Speed and accuracy improvements in FLAASH atmospheric correction of hyperspectral imagery

Remotely sensed spectral imagery of the earth's surface can be used to fullest advantage when the influence of the atmosphere has been removed and the measurements are reduced to units of reflectance. Here, we provide a comprehensive summary of the latest version of the Fast Line-of-sight Atmospheric Analysis of Spectral Hypercubes atmospheric correction algorithm. We also report some new code improvements for speed and accuracy. These include the re-working of the original algorithm in C-language code parallelized with message passing interface and containing a new radiative transfer look-up table option, which replaces executions of the MODTRAN® model. With computation times now as low as ~10  s per image per computer processor, automated, real-time, on-board atmospheric correction of hyper- and multi-spectral imagery is within reach.