A fast land surface temperature retrieval method for modis images using band 22 and 23 data

Land surface temperature (LST) is required by a series of surface studies and usually estimated using thermal infrared remote sensing data. In this paper, we propose a method to retrieve LST for MODIS data using its mid-infrared bands 22 and 23. As the central wavelengths of bands 22 and 23 are quite close, we assume that (1) band-averaged surface e-missivities are equal in these two bands, and (2) the Planck integration between these two bands comply to a statistical relationship. Based on these two assumptions, land surface temperature is retrieved after atmospheric correction on the radiance images. A test case is selected to estimate LST using our proposed method. The estimated LST image shows good consistency with the corresponding standard MODIS land surface temperature product, with the relative errors of ±1%. The experiment results suggest this methodology is effective to retrieve MODIS land surface temperature quickly.