Recovering land surface temperature under cloudy skies for potentially deriving surface emitted longwave radiation by fusing MODIS and AMSR-E measurements

Abstract

Longwave radiation is a key component of total energy that drives surface energy balance at the interface between the surface and atmosphere. To date, a number of algorithms have been developed toward accurately estimating surface longwave radiation from remotely sensed data. While most of these existing algorithms can only derive longwave radiation under clear-sky conditions due to the limited penetration of optical remote sensing thus leading to spatial incontinuity in derived radiation map. Wherein the land surface temperature (LST) play a key role in longwave radiation estimation, especially for surface emitted (upwelling) and net longwave flux. If LSTs under cloudy area can be recovered, the derivation of surface longwave ration under cloudy conditions would be straightforward. To this end, in this paper, a fusing strategy is proposed to combine the LST measurements from MODIS and AMSR-E. The results show that the proposed fusing strategy for combining microwave and optical space-based measurements in recovering surface LST under cloudy conditions is very effective. By fusion, the spatial coverage of valid LSTs over the globe is highly improved.