Investigation and validation of two all-weather land surface temperature products with in-situ measurements

Abstract

The need for cross-comparison and validation of all-weather Land Surface Temperature (LST) products has arisen due to the release of multiple such products aimed at providing comprehensive all-weather monitoring capabilities. In this study, we focus on validating two well-established all-weather LST products (i.e. MLST-AS and TRIMS LST) against in-situ measurements obtained from four high-quality LST validation sites: Evora, Gobabeb, KIT-Forest, and Lake Constance. For the land sites, MLST-AS exhibits better accuracy, with RMSEs ranging from 1.6 K to 2.1 K, than TRIMS LST, the RMSEs of which range from 1.9 K to 3.1 K. Because MLST-AS pixels classified as “inland water” are masked out, the validation over Lake Constance is limited to TRIMS LST: it yields a RMSE of 1.6 K. Furthermore, the validation results show that MLST-AS and TRIMS LST exhibit better accuracy under clear-sky conditions than unclear-sky conditions across all sites. Since the accuracy of the all-weather LST products is considerably affected by the input clear-sky LST products, we further compare the all-weather LST with the corresponding input clear-sky LST to conduct an error source analysis. Considering the clear-sky pixels on MLST-AS directly using the estimates from MLST, the error source analysis is limited to examining TRIMS LST and its input (i.e. MODIS LST). The findings indicate that TRIMS LST is highly correlated with MODIS LST. The investigation and validation of the two selected all-weather LST products objectively evaluate their accuracy and stability, which provides important information for applications of these all-weather LST products.