Vol. 1, issue 04, article # 11

Abstract:

The plant canopy bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) was calculated using tiie Monte Carlo method. Ross-Marshak canopy model was generalized to the case of an arbitrary leaf normal orientation. The contribution of the leaf reflectance specular component due to the leaf wax layer was taken into account. The effect of the leaf normal orientation on BRDF was estimated in the principal plane. Differences between the canopies having the leaf normal distributions with the same first moments but different second moments are discussed. A body of mathematics for the Monte Carlo method was derived and used in numerical experiments. The estimates show that the leaf normal orientation affects the contribution from the leaf reflectance specular component. The results obtained appear to be useful for interpreting the remote sensing data on vegetation and retrieval of the leaf normal orientation and wax layer size from the soil-canopy system reflectance.