Airborne measurement of hot spot reflectance signatures

The so-called hot spot is a fine directional signature of the surface reflectance observed for phase angles close to zero. In this paper, we analyze and discuss several such signatures acquired from the airborne POLDER and HyMap instruments during the DAISEX'99 campaign over agricultural crops. The observed signatures are very similar to those acquired from space at a resolution of several tens of kilometers [J. Geophys. Res. 107 (2002)], which provides further evidence that the hot spot is a scale-free feature. The hot spots can be fitted by a two-parameter function (amplitude and width) of the phase angle derived from canopy radiative transfer modeling. The model predicts that the amplitu…