The impact of spectral emissivity on the measurement of land surface temperature from a satellite

Abstract

The split-window method is successfully used to infer sea surface temperature from satellite radiances, principally because sea surface temperature is not very different from the air temperature near the surface and because the emissivity of the sea is constant over large areas and is not very different from one in the spectral channels of interest. This is not true for land surfaces and the split-window method has to be re-examined for such a case. This is the aim of this paper. In order to relate land surface temperature to the two brightness temperatures measured from space in the two channels of interest (namely, AVHRR 4 and AVHRR 5), several formulae are derived and their accuracies are discussed. Assuming that the emissivities ε₁ and ε₂ in the two channels considered, and therefore their average $ are unity, it is shown that the error ΔT generated on the land surface temperature by correcting atmospheric effects using the split-window method in most situations studied is of the order of $ This error may be quite significant, except for the sea surface where it is shown to be negligible. In order to infer land surface temperature from space, it is therefore necessary to know the surface spectral emissivity to good accuracy. Possible methods to determine it are then proposed and discussed.