Development of Land Surface Temperature Retrieval Algorithm from the MTSAT-2 Data

Land surface temperature (LST) is a one of the key variables of land surface which can be estimated from geostationary meteorological satellite. In this study, we have developed the three sets of LST retrieval algorithm from MTSAT-2 data through the radiative transfer simulations under various atmospheric profiles (TIGR data), satellite zenith angle, spectral emissivity, and surface lapse rate conditions using MODTRAN 4. The three LST algorithms are daytime, nighttime and total LST algorithms. The weighting method based on the solar zenith angle is developed for the consistent retrieval of LST at the early morning and evening time. The spectral emissivity of two thermal infrared channels is estimated by using vegetation coverage method with land cover map and 15-day normalized vegetation index data. In general, the three LST algorithms well estimated the LST without regard to the satellite zenith angle, water vapour amount, and surface lapse rate. However, the daytime LST algorithm shows a large bias especially for the warm LST (> 300 K) at day time conditions. The night LST algorithm shows a relatively large error for the LST (260 ~ 280K) at the night time conditions. The sensitivity analysis showed that the performance of weighting method is clearly improved regardless of the impacting conditions although the improvements of the weighted LST compared to the total LST are quite different according to the atmospheric and surface lapse rate conditions. The validation results of daytime (nighttime) LST with MODIS LST showed that the correlation coefficients, bias and RMSE are about 0.62~0.93 (0.44~0.83), -1.47~1.53 (-1.80~0.17), and 2.25~4.77 (2.15~ 4.27), respectively. However, the performance of daytime/nighttime LST algorithms is slightly degraded compared to that of the total LST algorithm.