i.albedo(1)

📦
version 8.4.2 · 8 versions
, in fedora 44

💖 i.albedo 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the i.albedo page from the GRASS GIS User's Manual — she's giving imagery, she's giving reflectance, she's literally the moment ✨

✨ NAME ✨

i.albedo — Computes broad band albedo from surface reflectance. no cap, that's her whole job 🫶

🏷️ KEYWORDS 🏷️

imagery, albedo, reflectance, satellite, Landsat, ASTER, AVHRR, MODIS

🌈 SYNOPSIS 🌈

i.albedo
i.albedo --help
i.albedo [-mnl8acd] input=name[,name,...] output=name  [--overwrite]
[--help]  [--verbose]  [--quiet]  [--ui]

🎀 Flags 🎀

  • -m — MODIS (7 input bands:1,2,3,4,5,6,7)
  • -n — NOAA AVHRR (2 input bands:1,2)
  • -l — Landsat 5+7 (6 input bands:1,2,3,4,5,7)
  • -8 — Landsat 8 (7 input bands:1,2,3,4,5,6,7)
  • -a — ASTER (6 input bands:1,3,5,6,8,9)
  • -c — Aggressive mode (Landsat). Albedo dry run to calculate some water to beach/sand/desert stretching, a kind of simple atmospheric correction
  • -d — Soft mode (MODIS). Albedo dry run to calculate some water to beach/sand/desert stretching, a kind of simple atmospheric correction
  • --overwrite — Allow output files to overwrite existing files
  • --help — Print usage summary
  • --verbose — Verbose module output
  • --quiet — Quiet module output
  • --ui — Force launching GUI dialog

🦋 Parameters 🦋

  • input=name[,name,...] [required] — Name of input raster map
  • output=name [required] — Name for output raster map

💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

So i.albedo calculates the albedo — that's the Shortwave surface reflectance, in the range of 0.3-3 micro-meters, periodt. 🌞

She takes as input individual bands of surface reflectance originating from MODIS, AVHRR, Landsat or Aster satellite sensors, and calculates the albedo for those. Iconic.

And heads up: this is a precursor to r.sun and any energy-balance processing, iykyk. 🔥

📝 NOTES 📝

  • For Landsat 8 she uses the weighted average reflectance — temporary solution until an algorithm is found, fr fr 🙈
  • She assumes MODIS product surface reflectance in [0;10000].

🌸 EXAMPLE 🌸

The following example creates the raster map "albedo_lsat7_1987" from the LANDSAT-TM5 bands in the North Carolina dataset:

g.region raster=lsat5_1987_10 -p
i.albedo -l input=lsat5_1987_10,lsat5_1987_20,lsat5_1987_30,lsat5_1987_40,lsat5_1987_50,lsat5_1987_70 output=albedo_lsat7_1987

Figure: Resulting albedo map from LANDSAT 5

The following example creates the raster map "albedo_lsat7_2000" from the LANDSAT-TM7 bands in the North Carolina dataset:

g.region raster=lsat7_2000_10 -p
i.albedo -l input=lsat7_2000_10,lsat7_2000_20,lsat7_2000_30,lsat7_2000_40,lsat7_2000_50,lsat7_2000_70 output=albedo_lsat7_2000

Figure: Resulting albedo map from LANDSAT 7

🧚 TODO 🧚

Maybe change input requirement of MODIS to [0.0-1.0]? 👀 (manifesting this one, bestie)

📚 REFERENCES 📚

For a 2 band determination of the Aster BB Albedo see the following:

Salleh and Chan, 2014. Land Surface Albedo Determination: Remote Sensing and Statistical Validation. in proceedings of FIG 2014 (PDF)

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

r.sun, i.vi

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Yann Chemin

💾 SOURCE CODE 💾

Available at: i.albedo source code (history)

Accessed: Saturday Jan 17 05:41:39 2026

Main index | Imagery index | Topics index | Keywords index | Graphical index | Full index

and that's the whole page, bestie!! 🫶 this was the GRASS 8.4.2 Reference Manual, © 2003-2025 GRASS Development Team, accessed Saturday Jan 17 05:41:39 2026, and the manual you just read was i.albedo(1) for GRASS 8.4.2 ✨💖 slay, go compute some albedo 🎀🌈

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