Patent ID: 7379592

Claim:
A system for detecting and enhancing meteorological imagery of dust clouds over land and water, said system comprising: a collector for storing multispectral optical-spectrum imagery having multiple channels relating to different wavelengths across the visible, shortwave infrared, and thermal infrared portions of the optical spectrum; and a processor coupled to said collector, said processor operable to receives the multispectral optical-spectrum imagery and processes the digital data by, performing a numerical atmosnheric correction for removal of molecular scatter within all of the visible-spectrum channels, based on radiative transfer calculations stored in pre-computed look-up tables and indexed as a function of solar and sensor geometry, determining the pixel background for each pixel of the multispectral optical-spectrum image by combining known earth location with a terrestrial database, employing a background-dependent algorithm to compute the dust enhancement parameter Δ, displaying the multispectral optical-spectrum imagery coupled to the processor, said displaying the multispectral optical-spectrum imagery comprises a red, blue and green color for displaying the visible light spectrum via a hue/saturation decomposed color technique, creating a false color composite, wherein said false color composite is created by loading the background-dependent D variable into a red color gun, loading log-scaled percent-reflectance into blue and green color guns of said false color composite, and the resultant imagery rendered depicts atmospheric dust as visually enhanced in red/pink tonalities.