Albedo is a dominant factor of the radiation balance and thus of great importance for the Earth's climate. Therefore, the albedo project focuses on processing and analyzing a long-time series of land surface albedo covering the European Alps, which will bring new insights on albedo changes during the last 25 years. The main goals are to show the spatial and temporal distribution of albedo and to generate a consistent albedo dataset with a high spatial and temporal resolution.
When deriving surface albedo it has to be considered, that unlike simple theoretical models, Earth's surface does not reflect isotropically. To take the anisotropic surface reflectance into account, knowledge of the Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) is required. The BRDF describes the scattering of a parallel beam of incident light from one direction in the hemisphere into another direction in the hemisphere and represents the intrinsic reflectance properties of a surface.
