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As a test-bed for future investigations of directly imaged terrestrialexoplanets, we present the recovery of the surface components of the Earth frommulti-band diurnal light curves obtained with the EPOXI spacecraft. We findthat the presence and longitudinal distribution of ocean, soil and vegetationare reasonably well reproduced by fitting the observed color variations with asimplified model composed of a priori known albedo spectra of ocean, soil,vegetation, snow and clouds. The effect of atmosphere, including clouds, onlight scattered from surface components is modeled using a radiative transfercode. The required noise levels for future observations of exoplanets are alsodetermined. Our model-dependent approach allows us to infer the presence ofmajor elements of the planet (in the case of the Earth, clouds and ocean) withobservations having S/N $\gtrsim 10$ in most cases and with high confidence ifS/N $\gtrsim 20$. In addition, S/N $\gtrsim 100$ enables us to detect thepresence of components other than ocean and clouds in a fairlymodel-independent way. Degradation of our inversion procedure produced by cloudcover is also quantified. While cloud cover significantly dilutes the magnitudeof color variations compared to the cloudless case, the pattern of colorchanges remains. Therefore, the possibility of investigating surface featuresthrough light curve fitting remains even for exoplanets with cloud coversimilar to the Earth's.

Colors of a Second Earth II: Effects of Clouds on Photometric Characterization of Earth-like Exoplanets