DirecTES: A Direct Method for Land and Sea Surface Temperature and Emissivity Separation for Thermal Infrared Sensors—Application to TRISHNA and ECOSTRESS

Abstract

The coming years will see the launch of several missions (TRISHNA, LSTM, SBG), which will acquire images in four or more spectral bands in thermal infrared (TIR) at high spatial resolution (~50–60 m) and with high temporal revisit (~2–3 days). The derivation of surface temperature and emissivity values from top-of-atmosphere radiances is not straightforward, as it is a non-deterministic process requiring additional information. In this paper, we propose the algorithm DirecTES to efficiently separate surface temperature and emissivity. This algorithm is based on the use of a comprehensive spectral database of emissivity, resulting in a well-posed deterministic problem while not assuming strong hypotheses. The algorithm can also benefit from non-TIR information, such as the acquisitions from the same satellite but in the visible and near-infrared domains, or exogenous data—land/sea mask or soil-occupation map. These would help identify the nature of the surface and therefore improve the temperature and emissivity retrievals. After the complete description of the method, we evaluate the performances of DirecTES on theoretical landscapes in TRISHNA’s context under a large range of atmospheric conditions. The retrievals of surface temperature reach RMSEs of 0.8 K over vegetation and 0.5 K over water, including both sensor and atmospheric uncertainties. We then evaluate DirecTES on ECOSTRESS images on sites where the ECOSTRESS Land Surface Temperature (LST) performance has been documented; DirecTES surface temperature retrievals are consistent with the ECOSTRESS LST product and the in-situ data.