The monograph being proposed for the English-speaking research community
is concentrated on the atmospheric correction of satellite images as a
part of thematic interpretation procedures while processing remote
sensing data. For linguistic reasons a large section of the community
may have been unaware of the progress made in Russia in this field of
science and technology. Meanwhile, Russia was the first country to
launch the first artificial satellite in 1957 and to obtain from space
for the first time spectra of the Earth's atmosphere in the 1960's. New
applications of the radiation transfer theory for the atmosphere-
underlying surface system appeared first in Russia in the 1970's. Direct
and in- verse problems of the atmospheric optics were then formulated
giving the scientific basis for studies of natural resources from space.
Since that time new mathematical treatments for the atmospheric
correction procedures have been widely developed in Russia, including
both analytical and numerical tech- niques to simulate spectral,
angular, and spatial distributions of the outgoing radiation in visual
and infrared regions. The authors of the book were at the beginning of
the scientific approach. A wide range of mathematical im- provements to
elaborate polinomial approximations for dependencies between atmospheric
radiation field and parameters of space surveying was due to the
necessity to process satellite images in real time using special
software of ex- isted computer means for the studies.