Ice Surface Temperature Retrieval from a Single Satellite Imager Band

Yinghui Liu,Jeffrey Key,Richard Dworak

doi:10.3390/rs10121909

Abstract

Current methods for estimating the surface temperature of sea and lake ice—the ice surface temperature (IST)—utilize two satellite imager thermal bands (11 and 12 μm) at moderate spatial resolution. These “split-window” or dual-band methods have been shown to have low biases and uncertainties. A single-band algorithm would be useful for satellite imagers that have only the 11 μm band at high resolution, such as the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), or that do not have a fully functional 12 μm band, such as the Thermal Infrared Sensor onboard the Landsat 8. This study presents a method for single-band IST retrievals, and validation of the retrievals using IST measurements from an airborne infrared radiation pyrometer during the NASA IceBridge campaign in the Arctic. Results show that IST with a single thermal band from the VIIRS has comparable performance to IST with the VIIRS dual-band (split-window) method, with a bias of 0.22 K and root-mean-square error of 1.03 K.

Highlights

The surface temperature of sea ice, referred to as ice surface temperature (IST), is one of the most fundamental variables for assessing changes in Arctic climate [1]
Accurate and consistent measurement of the ice surface temperature across the Arctic is key to understanding Arctic climate change
We propose an updated single-band IST retrieval equation: Ts = a + b × T11 + c × secθ where Ts is the estimated IST, a, b, and c are retrieval coefficients, T11 is brightness temperature at 11 μm band, and θ is the sensor scan angle

Summary

Introduction

The surface temperature of sea ice, referred to as ice surface temperature (IST), is one of the most fundamental variables for assessing changes in Arctic climate [1]. A dual-band regression algorithm utilizes the brightness temperature difference between the “split window” 11 and 12 μm thermal bands to account for the atmospheric absorption [3,4] This approach is most common, and has been applied to retrieve IST using data from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) [3], the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) [5], and the Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) onboard the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) satellite and the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) [6,7]. An IST product from Landsat 8 using either a dual-band or single-band algorithm is desirable for studying sea ice in greater detail, and for deriving other products. We first describe the single-band IST algorithm and the validation dataset, show the results of the validation

Materials and Methods

Discussion

Findings

Conclusions