Satellite-derived land surface temperature: Current status and perspectives

Abstract Land surface temperature (LST) is one of the key parameters in the physics of land surface processes from local through global scales. The importance of LST is being increasingly recognized and there is a strong interest in developing methodologies to measure LST from space. However, retrieving LST is still a challenging task since the LST retrieval problem is ill-posed. This paper reviews the current status of selected remote sensing algorithms for estimating LST from thermal infrared (TIR) data. A brief theoretical background of the subject is presented along with a survey of the algorithms employed for obtaining LST from space-based TIR measurements. The discussion focuses on TI…