Land Surface Temperature (LST) Retrieval from GOES Satellite Observations - Satellite-based Applications on Climate Change - page 281

19.1.1 Literature Review

19.1.1.1 Importance of Skin Temperature

Land surface temperature (LST), a key indicator of the Earth's surface energy
budget, plays an important role in land surface processes on regional as well as on
global scales. It combines the surface-atmosphere interactions and energy fluxes
between the atmosphere and the ground (Mannstein 1987). It is of fundamental
importance to the net radiation budget at the Earth's surface and to monitoring the
state of crops and vegetation (Norman and Becker 1995 ; Li and Becker 1993 ;
Sellers et al. 1998 ). Therefore, it is required for a wide variety of climate, hydro-
logical, ecological, and biogeochemical studies (Camillo 1991; Schmugge and
Becker 1991; Running 1991; Zhang et al. 1995; Running et al. 1994).
Skin temperatures at the Earth's surface are important for the study of global
warming (Knox 1999; Jin and Dickerson 2002). Typically, global temperature change
is assessed by in situ surface air temperature (SAT) measurements at 2 m height at
weather stations. However, weather stations are usually located in relatively densely
populated regions where anthropogenic impacts may affect measurements, and thus
the temperature record may not be representative of global change. Moreover, station
observations are sparse and unevenly distributed, and suffer from differences in
elevation and time of observation (Peterson 2003 ). The use of satellite-derived data
could contribute to a large-area consistent measurement (Gallo et al. 1999 ). Satellite
LST can also be assimilated into climate, mesoscale atmospheric, and land surface
models to estimate sensible heat flux and latent heat flux. It can also be applied for
analyzing climate change due to its rich archive from being routinely produced from
imagery data of geostationary and polar-orbiting satellites.
A long-term data set of satellite-derived land surface temperature can be used as
an index of greenhouse effect and climate change. For example, accurate Arctic
snow and ice surface temperature is needed to improve estimates of the heat budget
in the polar region and our understanding of its link to the global climate change
(Yu et al. 1995). Canopy temperature may be used to estimate evapotranspiration
and sensible heat flux (Vining and Blad 1992), to evaluate water requirements of
wheat (Jackson et al. 1977), and sensible and latent heat fluxes (Kimura and
Shimiru 1994). Satellite-measured surface temperature may be used to improve
models and methods for evaluating land surface energy balance (Diak and Whipple
1993; Crago et al. 1995). Furthermore, atmospheric general circulation model
(GCM) simulations indicate that stronger summer monsoons are associated with
higher land temperatures (Meehl 1994).

19.1.1.2 LST Derivation from Satellites Under Clear Conditions

The first effort to retrieve LST from satellites was made by Price ( 1984 ), by
adopting the AVHRR sea surface temperature (SST) split-window algorithm over