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Playas in endorheic basins are of environmental value and highly scientific because of their natural habitats of a wide variety of species and indicators for climatic changes and tectonic activities within continents. Remote sensing, due to its capability of acquiring repetitive data with synoptic coverage, provides a unique tool to monitor and collect spatial information about playas. Most studies have concentrated on evaporite mineral distribution using remote sensing techniques but research about grain size distribution and geomorphologic changes in playas has been rarely reported. We analysed playa morphodynamics using Landsat time series data in a semi-arid endorheic basin, Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia. The spectral libraries explaining the relationship between surface reflectance and surficial materials are extracted from the Landsat image on 11 November 2012, the collected samples in the area and the precipitation data. Such spectral libraries are then applied to the classification of the other Landsat images from 1985-2011 using maximum likelihood classifier. Four types of surficial materials on the playa are identified: salty surface, silt-rich surface, clay-rich surface and pure salt. The silt-rich surface is related to crevasse splays and river banks while the clay-rich surface is associated with floodplain and channel depressions. The classification results show that the silt-rich surface tends to have a positive relationship with annual precipitation, whereas the

Topography affects the fraction of direct and diffuse radiation received on a pixel and changes the sun-target-sensor geometry, resulting in variations in the observed radiance. Retrieval of surface-atmosphere properties from top of atmosphere radiance may need to account for topographic effects. This study investigates how such effects can be taken into account for top of atmosphere radiance modeling. In this paper, a system for top of atmosphere radiance modeling over heterogeneous non-Lambertian rugged terrain through radiative transfer modeling is presented. The paper proposes an extension of "the four-stream radiative transfer theory" , 2007) mainly aimed at representing topography-induced contributions to the top of atmosphere radiance modeling. A detailed account for BRDF effects, adjacency effects and topography effects on the radiance modeling is given, in which sky-view factor and non-Lambertian reflected radiance from adjacent slopes are modeled precisely. The paper also provides a new formulation to derive the atmospheric coefficients from MODTRAN with only two model runs, to make it more computationally efficient and also avoiding the use of zero surface albedo as used in the four-stream radiative transfer theory. The modeling begins with four surface reflectance factors calculated by the Soil-Leaf-Canopy radiative transfer model SLC at the top of canopy and propagates them through the effects of the atmosphere, which is explained by six atmospheric coefficients, derived from MODTRAN radiative OPEN ACCESSRemote Sens. 2015, 7 8020 transfer code. The top of the atmosphere radiance is then convolved with the sensor characteristics to generate sensor-like radiance. Using a composite dataset, it has been shown that neglecting sky view factor and/or terrain reflected radiance can cause uncertainty in the forward TOA radiance modeling up to 5 (mW/m 2 ·sr·nm). It has also been shown that this level of uncertainty can be translated into an over/underestimation of more than 0.5 in LAI (or 0.07 in fCover) in variable retrieval.

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