Land Surface Temperature

Team Members: Yunyue Yu, Peng Yu, Yuling Liu, and Heshun Wang

Background

Land surface temperature (LST) is one of the key variables in the weather and climate system controlling surface heat and water exchange at the land-atmosphere interface. Satellite measured LST, however, is mostly based on ther-mal infrared band observations, which theoretically give the temperature at some nominal skin depth of the surface. In the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES)-R Series mission, LST is measured from its on-board Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI). Knowledge of LST gives critical information on temporal and spatial vari-ations of the surface equilibrium state and is of fundamental importance to many aspects of geoscience. Remotely sensed LST can be assimilated into weather and climate models to optimize weather and climate predictions, be applied as input data for mesoscale atmospheric and land surface models to es-timate sensible heat flux and latent heat flux, or be utilized to evaluate model prediction performance. It has been widely used in commercial applications including the evaluation of water requirements for crops in summer, and to estimate where and when damaging frost may occur in winter. LST can also provide warning signs for possible forest and grass fires, as well as an indicator of possible drought, just to name a few . In 2016, the World Meteorological Organization included LST as one of the essential climate variables (ECVs) in the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS, 2017).