Determination of Land Surface Temperature from AMSR-E data for bare surfaces

Land Surface Temperature (LST) is a major concern in the earth science. Accurately retrieving LST from passive microwave data will promote work in many other research fields. In this paper, a simple linear relationship is developed to relate the microwave surface emissivities at vertical and horizontal polarizations for the channels of Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) instrument. On the basis of this relationship and the radiative transfer equation, a method is also proposed to derive directly LST from AMSR-E data, provided that the volumetric soil moisture and atmospheric quantities are known or can be estimated a prior. The preliminary validation results indicate that LST can be obtained with a RMSE of 1.4 K from the simulated data with NEΔT=1.0 K, as for the actual AMSR-E data over the desert region, compared with MODIS LST product, the proposed method can give an estimation of LST with a RMSE of 4.9 K.