3D Radiative Transfer Simulations of Virtual Forest Scenes: from Reflectance, SIF to Photosynthesis
Instructors: Jianbo Qi Description: Understanding the interaction between solar radiation and forest canopies is important for advancing our capabilities in remote sensing retrieval of biophysical parameters, plant phenotyping studies, and ecological modeling. LESS (www.lessrt.org) is a ray tracing-based 3D radiative transfer model that can simulate various remote sensing signals and radiative budget related parameters over arbitrary complex landscapes, thus helping us to understand how solar radiation is affected by complex vegetation structures. This tutorial will first provide a short introduction to the basic principle of 3D radiative transfer modeling. Then, a hands-on demonstration on how LESS (and its Python SDK) can be used to simulate images, bidirectional reflectance factor, absorbed photosynthetically active radiation, LiDAR waveform/point cloud, chlorophyll fluorescence, canopy photosynthesis, radiative budget, among others, over generated/reconstructed forest virtual scenes. It also includes basic processing of airborne and terrestrial LiDAR data to create 3D forest scenes for radiative transfer simulations. More details here.
