A method for the detection and correction of water pixels affected by adjacency effects is presented. The approach is based on the comparison of spectra with the near infrared (NIR) similarity spectrum. Pixels affected by adjacency effects have a water-leaving reflectance spectrum with a different shape to the reference spectrum. This deviation from the similarity spectrum is used as a measure for the adjacency effect. Secondly, the correspondence with the NIR similarity spectrum is used to quantify and to correct for the contribution of the background radiance during atmospheric correction. The advantage of the approach is that it requires no a priori assumptions on the sediment load or related reflectance values in the NIR and can therefore be applied to turbid waters. The approach is tested on hyperspectral airborne data (Compact Airborne Spectrographic Imager (CASI), Airborne Hyperspectral Scanner (AHS)) acquired above coastal and inland waters at different flight altitudes and under varying atmospheric conditions. As the NIR similarity spectrum forms the basis of the approach, the method will fail for water bodies for which this similarity spectrum is no longer valid.