A study of the impact of aerosols on the estimation of land surface temperature from space using simulation of satellite data

Abstract

Accurate estimation of land surface temperature (LST) is strongly required for many applications such as environmental studies. However, there are several algorithms in the literature for estimating LST from satellite those do not take into account the effect of the aerosols. Actually, these aerosols can exert an important influence on the estimation of LST from satellite thermal infrared data. Therefore, in this paper we presented a theoretical study and a simple methodology to show the impact of the aerosols on the estimation of LST from satellite in the thermal infrared region. For this, the simulation by the radiative transfer code Modtran3.5 has been carried out. The results showed that, the impact of aerosols on the estimation of LST depends on the Viewing angle, atmospheric situation, type of aerosols and surface emissivity. The results showed also that, the difference between LST estimated when the aerosol model is considered with respect to atmosphere without aerosol content varies increasingly with the viewing angle and is very sensitive to the situation of the atmosphere and varies decreasingly with the visibility and varies increasingly with the surface emissivity. This work shows that, for the lowest values of the visibility, the impact of aerosols is important and correction is needed for estimating LST. Discussion about this is given in this work.