Temperature and emissivity separation from ASTER data for low spectral contrast surfaces

The performance of Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) thermal infrared (TIR) data product algorithms was evaluated for low spectral contrast surfaces (such as vegetation and water) in a test site close to Valencia, Spain. Concurrent ground measurements of surface temperature, emissivity, and atmospheric radiosonde profiles were collected at the test site, which is a thermally homogeneous area of rice crops with nearly full vegetation cover in summer. Using the ground data and the local radiosonde profiles, at-sensor radiances were simulated for the ASTER TIR channels and compared with L1B data (calibrated at-sensor radiances) showing discrepancies up to 3% in radiance for channel 10 at 8.3 μm (equivalently, 2.5 °C in temperature or 7% in emissivity), whereas channel 13 (10.7 μm) yielded a closer agreement (maximum difference of 0.5% in radiance or 0.4 °C in temperature). We also tested the ASTER standard products of land surface temperature (LST) and spectral emissivity generated with the Temperature-Emissivity Separation (TES) algorithm with standard atmospheric correction from both global data assimilation system profiles and climatology profiles. These products showed anomalous emissivity spectra with lower emissivity values and larger spectral contrast (or maximum-minimum emissivity difference, MMD) than expected, and as a result, overestimated LSTs. In this work, a scene-based procedure is proposed to obtain more accurate MMD estimates for low spectral contrast materials (vegetation and water) and therefore a better retrieval of LST and emissivity with the TES algorithm. The method uses various gray-bodies or near gray-bodies with known emissivities and assumes that the calibration and atmospheric correction performed with local radiosonde data are accurate for channel 13. Taking the channel 13 temperature (atmospherically and emissivity corrected) as the true LST, the radiances for the other channels were simulated and used to derive linear relationships between ASTER digital numbers and at-ground radiances for each channel. The TES algorithm was applied to the adjusted radiances and the resulting products showed a closer agreement with the ground measurements (differences lower than 1% in channel 13 emissivities and within ± 0.3 °C in temperature for rice and sea pixels).