High spatiotemporal resolution land surface temperature (LST) plays an important role in various environment applications. However, the limitation of thermal infrared sensors and the effect of clouds and other atmospheric conditions result in discontinuous daily thermal observations of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). Annual temperature cycle (ATC) models can help to supply daily continuous LSTs via limited observations, but these ATC models seldom consider the disturbance of weather conditions or the land cover change. On the other hand, spatial interpolation techniques also limit in implementation when available data in one day or several days are not able to obtain enough spatiotemporal information for LST reconstruction. The objective of this study is to propose a phenology-based ATC model (termed PATC), which takes the phenology change and local weather change into account, to reconstruct daily unscanned LSTs at an annual scale. Daily MODIS LSTs collected in 2015 were utilized to analyze the performance of PATC compared with other ATC models. Results show that PATC improved the accuracy by 1.6 and 0.5 K compared to the classic ATC model in the daytime and nighttime, respectively. Compared to the enhanced ATC model, PATC also shows better performance with higher accuracies, especially during the growing season of vegetation in the daytime. Future research may focus on an incorporation with Landsat observations and diurnal temperature cycle models to implement LST reconstruction at a diurnal scale.

Earthquakes are unpredictable and potentially destructive natural disasters that take a long time to recover from. Monitoring post-earthquake human activity (HA) is of great significance to recovery and reconstruction work. There is a strong correlation between night-time light (NTL) and HA, which aid in the study of spatiotemporal changes in post-earthquake human activities. However, seasonal and noise impact from National Polar-Orbiting Partnership Satellite Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (NPP/VIIRS) data greatly limits their application. To tackle these issues, random noise and seasonal fluctuation of NPP/VIIRS from January 2014 to December 2018 is removed by adopting the seasonal-trend decomposition procedure based on loess (STL). Based on the theory of post-earthquake recovery model, a post-earthquake night-time light piecewise (PNLP) pattern is explored by employing the National Polar-Orbiting Partnership Satellite Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (NPP/VIIRS) monthly data. PNLP indicators, including pre-earthquake development rate (k_p), recovery rate (k_r1), reconstruction rate (k_r2), development rate (k_d), relative reconstruction rate (k_rp) and loss (S), are defined to describe the PNLP pattern. Furthermore, the 2015 Nepal earthquake is chosen as a case study and the spatiotemporal changes in different areas are analyzed. The results reveal that: (1) STL is an effective algorithm for obtaining HA trend from the time series of denoising NTL; (2) the PNLP pattern, divided into four phases, namely the emergency phase (EP), recovery phase (RP-1), reconstruction phase (RP-2), and development phase (DP), aptly describes the variation in post-earthquake HA; (3) PNLP indicators are capable of evaluating the recovery differences across regions. The main socio-economic factors affecting the PNLP pattern and PNLP indicators are energy source for lighting, type of building, agricultural economy, and human poverty index. Based on the NPP/VIIRS data, the PNLP pattern can reflect the periodical changes of HA after earthquakes and provide an effective means for the analysis and evaluation of post-earthquake recovery and reconstruction.

Thermal sharpening expands the application of land surface temperature due to the trade-off between spatial and temporal resolutions. Fixed kernels (FK) are widely applied in two window strategies: local window strategies (LWS) and object-based window strategies (OWS). However, the fixed regression kernel effect on LWS and OWS has rarely been considered in existing studies. Due to the heterogeneity among different windows, it is important to select suitable kernels for each window either in OWS or LWS. This article presents an auto-adjusted kernel (AAK) method to resolve this issue and examines certain simple kernel selection rules in thermal sharpening aiming to balance accuracy and efficiency. We test the AAK method with Landsat 8 data and compare it to the FK method with both OWS and LWS. The results reveal that the AAK method generally performs better than the FK method. Compared to the FK method, the AAK method improves the OWS accuracy by 0.283 K on average at three downscaling ratios, and the accuracy improvement increases with increasing downscaling ratio (from 3 to 9). Especially when the downscaling ratio reaches to 9, there is an evident improvement with 0.425 K of AAK. Moreover, the AAK method enhances the mean LWS accuracy by 0.179 K overall and decreases the difference between OWS and LWS. Furthermore, the AAK method increases the accuracy in specific areas and reduces extreme-value points. These findings indicate the potential of the AAK method in thermal sharpening with OWS and LWS, which resolves kernel selection problems.