Towards Monitoring Satellite Land Surface Temperature Production

Abstract:

Land surface temperature (LST) is of fundamental importance to the net radiation budget at the Earth surface and to monitoring the state of crops and vegetation, as well as an important indicator of both the greenhouse effect and the energy flux between the atmosphere and the land. Since its launch on October 28, 2011, the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) satellite has been continuously providing data for LST production; intensive validation and calibration of the LST data have been conducted since then. To better monitor the performance of the S-NPP LST product and evaluate different retrieval algorithms for potential improvement, a near-real-time monitoring system has been developed and implemented. The system serves as a tool for both the routine monitoring and the deep-dive researches. It currently consists of two major components: the global cross-satellite LST comparisons between S-NPP/VIIRS and MODIS/AQUA, and the LST validation with respect to in-situ observations from SURFRAD network. Results about cross-satellite comparisons, satellite-in situ LST validation, and evaluation of different retrieval algorithms are routinely generated and published through an FTP server of the system ftp. The results indicate that LST from the S-NPP is comparable to that from MODIS. A few case studies using this tool will be analyzed and presented.