A Breife Review of Land Surface Temperature Retrieval Methods from Thermal Satellite Sensors

Land surface temperature (LST) has a significant role in the land surface characters on local and global scale. The most important task in estimation of LST from satellite thermal data is removing the effects of atmospheric attenuations, topographic and land surface emissivity. To date, several techniques have been proposed to retrieve LST with various applications, advantages and drawbacks. This paper aims to provide a brief review of three most applied LST acquisition methods including single-channel technique, split-window technique and multi-angle technique. This paper first provides a detail of theoretical background of LST retrieval and then reviews published studies about single-channel; split-window and multi-angle techniques. This survey shows that, the split-window technique has become most applied technique in LST related studies compared to the single-channel and multi-angle techniques. Because, the accuracy of estimated LST using splitwindow technique due to its less need to precise atmospheric temperature and water vapor content is higher. However, some limitations is remained in using LST products from thermal sensors, such as a trade-off between spatial and temporal resolutions in thermal data and uncertainties in accurate LST acquisition, which makes it valuable topic to concern in future studies.