Evaluation of MODIS and NCEP atmospheric products for land surface temperature retrieval from HJ-1B IRS thermal infrared data with ground measurements

In this paper, two atmospheric profile sources were assessed for land surface temperature retrieval purposes. One is the MODIS atmospheric profiles product (MOD07), and the other is the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) operational global analysis data. Atmospheric profiles were used as the input to the MODTRAN4 radiative transfer model to calculate atmospheric parameters involved in atmospheric correction with the aim of retrieving land surface temperature (LST) in the case of the TIR domain. The LST retrievals from the HJ-1B IRS data were compared with ground measured temperatures obtained from a series of field campaigns in Hebei province, China, from May to September 2010. Ground measurements were performed over four land cover types: bare soil, full-cover wheat, full-cover corn and water surface. Six days of measurements over the water surface and three days over land were collected. The results indicate that the LST derived from HJ-1B IRS data using the NCEP and MOD07 profiles both showed good agreement with the ground LSTs, with Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 1.19 and 1.51 K for NCEP and MOD07, respectively. The results presented in this paper show that the MODIS and NCEP atmospheric profiles are useful for accurate atmospheric correction in the TIR domain when local soundings are not available. In particular, the NCEP profile provides higher accuracy, whereas the MOD07 profile provides a higher spatial resolution.