An investigation of influencing factors of land surface temperature based on the iButton and MODIS temperature data

Abstract

To clarify the effects on land surface temperature (LST), continuous LSTs of 19 rural and 9 urban sites in Nanjing are measured. Though the LST has a positive correlation with the air temperature, the diurnal surface temperatures ranging between 0°C and 4°C are far less than the diurnal air temperatures of 6°C–16°C. The rainfall made the LSTs and diurnal surface temperatures lower than those on sunny days. Despite that, the relationship between LST and humidity suggests that the average diurnal surface temperatures decreased with the increase in the humidity. Additionally, we employed a corrected method for Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) temperature product and compared with the field-monitoring data collected from iButtons. The results demonstrate that the calibrated satellite temperatures have a better correlation with the measured values. MODIS temperatures and measured temperatures are different under different land types, and the MODIS temperature of a pixel is much closer to the LST of the dominated land type.