A Remote Sensing Method for Estimating Surface Air Temperature and Surface Vapor Pressure on a Regional Scale

This paper presents a method of estimating regional distributions of surface air temperature (Ta) and surface vapor pressure (ea), which uses remotely-sensed data and meteorological data as its inputs. The method takes into account the effects of both local driving force and horizontal advection on Ta and ea. Good correlation coefficients (R2) and root mean square error (RMSE) between the measurements of Ta/ea at weather stations and Ta/ea estimates were obtained; with R2 of 0.77, 0.82 and 0.80 and RMSE of 0.42K, 0.35K and 0.20K for Ta and with R2 of 0.85, 0.88, 0.88 and RMSE of 0.24hpa, 0.35hpa and 0.16hpa for ea, respectively, for the three-day results. This result is much better than that OPEN ACCESS Remote Sens. 2015, 7 6006 estimated from the inverse distance weighted method (IDW). The performance of Ta/ea estimates at Dongping Lake illustrated that the method proposed in the paper also has good accuracy for a heterogeneous surface. The absolute biases of Ta and ea estimates at Dongping Lake from the proposed method are less than 0.5Kand 0.7hpa, respectively, while the absolute biases of them from the IDW method are more than 2K and 3hpa, respectively. Sensitivity analysis suggests that the Ta estimation method presented in the paper is most sensitive to surface temperature and that the ea estimation method is most sensitive to available energy.