Ground validation and uncertainty esitmation of VIIRS land surface temperature product

Abstract

This study compares VIIRS LST with ground in-situ observations from Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN) and Global Monitoring Division (GMD) baseline observatories. The validation results present a close agreement between satellite estimation and ground observations with the accuracy about -0.4 K and -0.7 K, precision of 2.1 and 1.8 over BSRN CAB site and GOB site, respectively. A precision of 2.2 is obtained over Summit station in Greenland. Cloud contamination and ground heterogeneity are found to have great impact on the product performance. In addition, a statistical method is applied to estimate LST uncertainty attributed to the sensor noise, surface type product imprecision and algorithm itself. The overall theoretical LST uncertainty is about 0.7 K.