The reflectance of the Earth’s surface is significantly influenced by atmospheric conditions such as water vapor content and aerosols. Particularly, the absorption and scattering effects become stronger when the target features are non-bright objects, such as in aqueous or vegetated areas. For any remote-sensing approach, atmospheric correction is thus required to minimize those effects and to convert digital number (DN) values to surface reflectance. The main aim of this study was to test the three most popular atmospheric correction models, namely (1) Dark Object Subtraction (DOS); (2) Fast Line-of-sight Atmospheric Analysis of Spectral Hypercubes (FLAASH) and (3) the Second Simulation of Satellite Signal in the Solar Spectrum (6S) and compare them with Top of Atmospheric (TOA) reflectance. By using the k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) algorithm, a series of experiments were conducted for above-ground forest biomass (AGB) estimations of the Gongju and Sejong region of South Korea, in order to check the effectiveness of atmospheric correction methods for Landsat ETM+. Overall, in the forest biomass estimation, the 6S model showed the bestRMSE’s, followed by FLAASH, DOS and TOA. In addition, a significant improvement of RMSE by 6S was found with images when the study site had higher total water vapor and temperature levels. Moreover, we also tested the sensitivity of the atmospheric correction methods to each of the Landsat ETM+ bands. The results confirmed that 6S dominates the other methods, especially in the infrared wavelengths covering the pivotal bands for forest applications. Finally, we suggest that the 6S model, integrating water vapor and aerosol optical depth derived from MODIS products, is better suited for AGB estimation based on optical remote-sensing data, especially when using satellite images acquired in the summer during full canopy development.

:Recently, the demands of accurate forest carbon stock estimation and mapping are increasing in Korea. This study investigates the feasibility of two methods, k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) and Regression Tree Analysis (RTA), for carbon stock estimation of pilot areas, Gongju and Sejong cities. The 3rd and 5th ~ 6th NFI data were collected together with Landsat TM acquired in 1992, 2010 and Aster in 2009. Additionally, various vegetation indices and tasseled cap transformation were created for better estimation. Comparison between two methods was conducted by evaluating carbon statistics and visualizing carbon distributions on the map. The comparisons indicated clear strengths and weaknesses of two methods: kNN method has produced more consistent estimates regardless of types of satellite images, but its carbon maps were somewhat smooth to represent the dense carbon areas, particularly for Aster 2009 case. Meanwhile, RTA method has produced better performance on mean bias results and representation of dense carbon areas, but they were more subject to types of satellite images, representing high variability in spatial patterns of carbon maps. Finally, in order to identify the increases in carbon stock of study area, we created the difference maps by subtracting the 1992 carbon map from the 2009 and 2010 carbon maps. Consequently, it was found that the total carbon stock in Gongju and Sejong cities was drastically increased during that period. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 2) 연구자료 -6 54- 3) 탄소량 추정방법 Korean Journal of Remote Sensing, Vol.30, No.5, 2014 -6 56- Sensing, Vol.30, No.5, 2014 -6 58- 실험결과 및 분석

Now global climate change is changing environmental factors, such as temperature and precipitation, which have a great effect on crop yields. Accordingly, crop yield forecast is becoming more important to global food supplies and sustainable development of rural areas. Worldwide, many countries, such as USA, China, Canada, and institutions, such as FAO, USDA, NASA, maintain the cooperative relationship to operate the crop monitoring system at both the national and global scale. This paper aims to investigate the current developments of crop monitoring systems in terms of information level, remotelysensed data, and biophysical parameters, and to propose the direction of the advanced corp monitoring system based on remote sensing.

Now, water pollution is one of the leading concerns in the world especially heavy metal polltion. In recent years, researches on the use of agricultural waste as biochar and modified biochar to treat heavy metals in water are receiving the attention of scientists because of the economy as well as the high processing efficiency that it brings. In this study, biochar from rice husk was synthesized and modified by iron, then the obtained materials were characterized by SEM, FTIR methods. The results show that the Fe-biochar shows a high potential to remove arsenic at pH = 4 and the adsorption capacity was 18,96 – 28,49 mg/g.