On the monitoring of land surface temperatures with the NOAA/AVHRR: Removing the effect of satellite orbit drift

Abstract

To study the inter-annual variability of land surface temperature with NOAA Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) data, one must account for changes in the observed radiances due to changes in the observation time caused by satellite orbit drift (SOD). This study proposes a simple method to remove the SOD component from the AVHRR thermal IR. Spurious trends in these data should be corrected for to prevent their misidentification as real trends in the Earth's climate system and to infer more reliable conclusions from the inter-annual land surface variability studies, such as monitoring droughts. The proposed correction requires information on the observation solar zenith angle and normalized difference vegetation index for the region of interest.