6533b826fe1ef96bd12845bb

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Monthly Land Surface Temperature maps over European Zone using Advanced Along Track Scanning Radiometer data for 2007

subject

description

Land Surface Temperature (LST) monthly maps are necessary in climatic studies and remote sensing is a key tool used to obtain these maps. For this reason, we used the LST product of AATSR on board Envisat. This product uses a split-window algorithm which depends on vertical column water vapour content (W) and viewing angle. The algorithm proposed in Galve et al. [1] was also used, which is based on the Coll and Caselles [2] split-window model and depends explicitly on the emissivity and W. This algorithm was tested with concurrent ground measurements in the Valencia validation site, yielding an error of + 0.5 K. With both algorithms we perform LST maps over Europe with a spatial resolution of 0.05o using the emissivities given in the monthly average of the MODIS MOD11_8D product. Regarding W, we obtain it through the NCEP global Tropospheric Analysis product. In order to evaluate the quality of the maps we resampled these to a 1° pixel size for comparison with the LST from the NCEP Global Tropospheric Analyses product. The most similar algorithm to NCEP LST is Galve et al. [1] with a difference lower than ± 1.2 K. Regarding the maps obtained from the AATSR LST product, the difference was close to ± 1.7 K.