No abstract

Satellite thermal remote sensing provides land surface temperatures (LST) over extensive areas that are vital in various applications, but this technique suffers from its sampling style and the impenetrability of clouds, which frequently generates data gaps. Annual temperature cycle (ATC) models can fill these gaps and estimate continuous daily LST dynamics from a number of thermal observations. However, the standard ATC model (termed ATC S ) remains incapable of quantifying the short-term LST variations caused by synoptic conditions. By incorporating in-situ surface air temperatures (SATs) and satellite-derived normalized difference vegetation indexes (NDVIs), here we proposed an enhanced ATC model (ATC E ) to describe the daily LST fluctuations. With Aqua/MODIS LST products as validation data, we implemented and tested the ATC E over the Yangtze River Delta region of China. The results demonstrate that, when compared with the ATC S , the overall root mean square errors of the ATC E decrease by 1.0 and 0.8 K for the day and night, respectively. The accuracy improvements vary with land cover types with greater improvements over the forest, grassland, and built-up areas than over cropland and wetland. The assessments at different time scales further confirm that LST fluctuations can be better described by the ATC E . Though with limitations, we consider this new model and its associated parameters hold great potentials in various applications.

No abstract

The trade‐off between the spatial and temporal resolutions of satellite‐derived land surface temperature (LST) gives birth to disaggregation of LST (DLST). However, the concurrent enhancement of the spatiotemporal resolutions of LST remains difficult, and many studies disregard the conservation of thermal radiance between predisaggregated and postdisaggregated LSTs. Here we propose a new dynamic methodology to enhance concurrently the spatiotemporal resolutions of satellite‐derived LSTs. This methodology conducts DLST by the controlling parameters of the temperature cycle models, i.e., the diurnal temperature cycle (DTC) model and annual temperature cycle (ATC) model, rather than directly by the LST. To achieve the conservation of thermal radiance between predisaggregated and postdisaggregated LSTs, herein we incorporate a modulation procedure that adds temporal thermal details to coarse resolution LSTs rather than straightforwardly transforms fine‐resolution scaling factors into LSTs. Indirect validations at the same resolution show that the mean absolute error (MAE) between the predicted and reference LSTs is around 1.0 K during a DTC; the associated MAE is around 2.0 K during an ATC, but this relatively lower accuracy is due more to the uncertainty of the ATC model. The upscaling validations indicate that the MAE is around 1.0 K and the normalized mean absolute error is around 0.3. Comparisons between the DTC‐ and ATC‐based DLST illustrate that the former retains a higher accuracy, but the latter holds a higher flexibility on days when background low‐resolution LSTs are unavailable. This methodology alters the static DLST into a dynamic way, and it is able to provide temporally continuous fine‐resolution LSTs; it will also promote the design of DLST methods for the generation of high‐quality LSTs.