This paper describes a computationally fast and accurate technique for the atmospheric correction of satellite measurements in the solar spectrum. The main advantage of the method is that it is several hundred times faster than more detailed radiative transfer models like 5S and that it does not require precalculated look-up tables. The method is especially useful for correcting the huge amounts of data acquired by large-field-of-view high-repetitivity sensors, like the ones on board polar orbiting and geostationary meteorological satellites.