Accurate retrieval of land surface temperature (LST) over urban areas is of great significance for urban thermal environment monitoring. In previous studies, most of the urban LST retrieval methods were developed based on the assumption of a flat surface without considering the influence of urban 3-D geometry structure, which has a significant impact on the retrieval accuracy of LST over urban areas. In this study, a radiative transfer equation (RTE)-based single-channel method was developed to retrieve LST with urban geometry effect correction from the Landsat 8 thermal infrared (TIR) data in band 10. The increase in adjacent radiance from the surrounding pixels and the decrease in atmospheric downwelling radiance caused by urban geometry structure were taken into account in this method. Because it is difficult to directly validate the retrieval accuracy of LST over urban areas using in situ LST measurements, the performance of the RTE-based LST retrieval method was evaluated via comparing brightness temperature (BT) at the top of the atmosphere (TOA) simulated by the discrete anisotropic radiative transfer (DART) model and the urban RTE over three subregions. There is a good agreement between BT at the TOA simulated by the DART model and the urban RTE, with a root-mean-squared error (RMSE) of less than 0.25 K. The variations in LST retrieved with urban geometry effect correction over different local climate zones (LCZs) were analyzed. In general, built-up LCZs have relatively higher LST than land cover LCZs. The differences between LST retrieved without/with urban geometry effect correction over different LCZs are greater than 0.2 K. The largest average LST difference over built-up LCZs is approximately 0.9 K, whereas that over land cover LCZs is approximately 0.65 K. LST retrieved without/with urban geometry effect correction was used to calculate urban heat island intensity (UHII) in terms of the LCZ-based method. The results indicate that UHII calculated from LST with urban geometry effect correction is lower than that calculated from LST without urban geometry effect correction, with an average difference of approximately 0.5 K.

Currently, the main difficulty in separating the land surface temperature (LST) and land surface emissivity (LSE) from field-measured hyperspectral Thermal Infrared (TIR) data lies in solving the radiative transfer equation (RTE). Based on the theory of wavelet transform (WT), this paper proposes a method for accurately and effectively separating LSTs and LSEs from field-measured hyperspectral TIR data. We show that the number of unknowns in the RTE can be reduced by decomposing and reconstructing the LSE spectrum, thus making the RTE solvable. The final results show that the errors introduced by WT are negligible. In addition, the proposed method usually achieves a greater accuracy in a wet-warm atmosphere than that in a dry-cold atmosphere. For the results under instrument noise conditions (NE∆T = 0.2 K), the overall accuracy of the LST is approximately 0.1–0.3 K, while the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of the LSEs is less than 0.01. In contrast to the effects of instrument noise, our method is quite insensitive to noises from atmospheric downwelling radiance, and all the RMSEs of our method are approximately zero for both the LSTs and the LSEs. When we used field-measured data to better evaluate our method’s performance, the results showed that the RMSEs of the LSTs and LSEs were approximately 1.1 K and 0.01, respectively. The results from both simulated data and field-measured data demonstrate that our method is promising for decreasing the number of unknowns in the RTE. Furthermore, the proposed method overcomes some known limitations of current algorithms, such as singular values and the loss of continuity in the spectrum of the retrieved LSEs.

The radiances observed by satellites are influenced by both land surface and atmospheric parameters, and it is difficult to retrieve these parameters simultaneously from multispectral measurements with high accuracies. Even though several methods have been proposed, they focus on the retrieval of land surface or atmospheric parameters separately. Generally, these atmospheric parameters are atmospheric water vapor and temperature profiles. Thus, this study aims to establish a back propagation (BP) artificial neural network (ANN) to retrieve land surface emissivity (LSE), land surface temperature (LST), atmospheric transmittance, upward radiance, and downward radiance simultaneously from the hyperspectral thermal infrared (TIR) data, suitable for various air mass types and surface conditions. The principle component analysis technique is first used to compress and remove noise from the data. The evaluation of the ANN using the simulated data without noise indicated that the root mean square error (RMSE) of LST is approximately 0.643 K; the RMSEs of emissivity, transmittance, upward, and downward radiance are approximately 0.0046, 0.005, 0.72, and 2.95 K, respectively. When applied on the simulated data containing noise, the errors of LST, LSE, transmittance, upward, and downward radiance are 1.26, 0.01, 0.01, 1.54, and 4.57 K, respectively. When applied on the real atmospheric infrared sounder data, the retrieved accuracies become worse because of various unstudied reasons. However, the results show that the proposed ANN is promising in retrieving the land surface and atmospheric parameters simultaneously. Because of its simplicity, the proposed ANN can be used to produce preliminary results employed as the first estimates for physics-based retrieval methods.

Hyperspectral remote sensing data with bandwidth of nanometre (nm) level have tens or even several hundreds of channels and contain abundant spectral information. Different channels have their own properties and show the spectral characteristics of various objects in image. Rational feature selection from the varieties of channels is very important for effective analysis and information extraction of hyperspectral data. This paper, taking Shunyi region of Beijing as a study area, comprehensively analysed the spectral characteristics of hyperspectral data. On the basis of analysing the information quantity of bands, correlation between different bands, spectral absorption characteristics of objects and object separability in bands, a fundamental method of optimum band selection and feature extraction from hyperspectral remote sensing data was proposed.

In this letter, we propose a dual-temporal dual-channel (DTDC) algorithm for soil moisture retrieval by using time-series observations from the Sentinel-1 C-band synthetic aperture radar. This algorithm utilizes the ancillary information of vegetation water content derived from optical images and assumes no variation on the surface roughness during the two consecutive radar measurements. Therefore, with the DTDC backscatter observations, four equations could be established using forward models, while three unknowns (the two consecutive soil moisture values and one roughness parameter) could be solved simultaneously by minimizing a cost function. The algorithm was tested with a series of Sentinel-1 dual-channel (VV + VH) data over croplands (sugarcane and cassava) of Northeast Thailand with an upscaling resolution of 1 km. Results show that the proposed algorithm could well capture the temporal change of soil moisture with root-mean-square errors within 0.06 m ³ /m ³ when ignoring days with precipitation, and could achieve a similar spatial pattern of soil moisture as detected from the Soil Moisture Active Passive mission, indicating the Sentinel-1 might be a proper tool for agricultural water management.

Accurate inversion of land surface temperature (LST) from remote sensing data is an essential and challenging topic for earth observation applications. This paper successfully retrieves the LST from FY-3C/VIRR data with split-window method. With the simulated data, the algorithm coefficients are acquired with root mean square errors lower than 1.0 K for all subranges when view zenith angle (VZA) <; 30° and the water vapor content (WVC) <; 4.25 g/cm ² , as well as those in which the VZA <; 30° and the LST <; 307.5 K. In addition, a detailed sensitivity analysis is carried out. The analysis result indicates that the total LST uncertainty caused by the standard error of the algorithm, the uncertainties of land surface emissivity and WVC, and the instrument noise would be 1.22 K and 0.94 K for dry and wet atmosphere, respectively. Furthermore, LST retrieval method is applied to the visible and infrared radiometer measurements over the study area covering the geographical latitude of 31.671°N to 44.211°N and longitude of 10.739°W to 1.898°E, and the derived LST is cross-validated with Terra/MODIS LST product. The preliminary validation result shows that the split-window method determines the LST within 2.0 K for vegetation and soil areas.