Characterizing the land surface temperature (LST) and its diurnal cycle is important in understanding a range of surface properties, including soil moisture status, evaporative response, vegetation stress and ground heat flux. While remote-sensing platforms present a number of options to retrieve this variable, there are inevitable compromises between the resolvable spatial and temporal resolution. For instance, the spatial resolution of geostationary satellites, which can provide sub-hourly LST, is often too coarse (3 km) for many applications. On the other hand, higher-resolution polar orbiting satellites are generally infrequent in time, with return intervals on the order of weeks, limiting their capacity to capture surface dynamics. With recent developments in the application of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), there is now the opportunity to collect LST measurements on demand and at ultra-high spatial resolution. Here, we detail the collection and analysis of a UAV-based LST dataset, with the purpose of examining the diurnal surface temperature response: something that has not been possible from traditional satellite platforms at these scales. Two separate campaigns were conducted over a bare desert surface in combination with either Rhodes grass or a recently harvested maize field. In both cases, thermal imagery was collected between 0800 and 1700 local solar time. The UAV-based diurnal cycle was consistent with ground-based measurements, with a mean correlation coefficient and root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.99 and 0.68 °C, respectively. LST retrieved over the grass surface presented the best results, with an RMSE of 0.45 °C compared to 0.67 °C for the single desert site and 1.28 °C for the recently harvested maize surface. Even considering the orders of magnitude difference in scale, an exploratory analysis comparing retrievals of the UAV-based diurnal cycle with METEOSAT geostationary data yielded pleasing results (R = 0.98; RMSE = 1.23 °C). Overall, our analysis revealed a diurnal range over the desert and maize surfaces of ~20 °C and ~17 °C respectively, while the grass showed a reduced amplitude of ~12 °C. Considerable heterogeneity was observed over the grass surface at the peak of the diurnal cycle, which was likely indicative of the varying crop water status. To our knowledge, this study presents the first spatially varying analysis of the diurnal LST captured at ultra-high resolution, from any remote platform. Our findings highlight the considerable potential to utilize UAV-based retrievals to enhance investigations across multi-disciplinary studies in agriculture, hydrology and land-atmosphere investigations.

The land surface temperature (LST) represents a critical element in efforts to characterize global surface energy and water fluxes, as well as being an essential climate variable in its own right. Current satellite platforms provide a range of spatial and temporal resolution radiance data from which LST can be determined. One of the most complete records of data comes via the Landsat series of satellites, which provide a continuous sequence that extends back to 1982. However, for much of this time, Landsat thermal data were provided through a single broadband thermal channel, making surface temperature retrieval challenging. To fully exploit the valuable time-series of thermal information that is available from these satellites requires efforts to better describe and understand the accuracy of temperature retrievals. Here, we contribute to these efforts by examining the impact of atmospheric correction on the estimation of LST, using atmospheric profiles derived from a range of in-situ, reanalysis, and satellite data. Radiance data from the thermal infrared (TIR) sensor onboard Landsat 8 was converted to LST by using the MODTRAN version 5.2 radiative transfer model, allowing the production of an LST time series based upon 28 Landsat overpasses. LST retrievals were then evaluated against in-situ thermal measurements collected over an arid zone farmland comprising both bare soil and vegetated surface types. Atmospheric profiles derived from AIRS, MOD07, ECMWF, NCEP, and balloon-based radiosonde data were used to drive the MODTRAN simulations. In addition to examining the direct impact of using various profile data on LST retrievals, randomly distributed errors were introduced into a range of forcing variables to better understand retrieval uncertainty. Results indicated differences in LST of up to 1 K for perturbations in emissivity and profile measurements, with the analysis also highlighting the challenges in modeling aerosol optical depth (AOD) over arid lands and its impact on the TIR bands. Days with high AOD content (AOD > 0.5) in the evaluation study seem to consistently underestimate in-situ LSTs by 1–2 K, suggesting that MODTRAN is unable to accurately simulate the aerosol conditions for the TIR bands. Comparisons between available in-situ and Landsat 8 derived LST illustrate a range of seasonal and land surface dynamics and provide an assessment of retrieval accuracy throughout the nine-month long study period. In terms of the choice of atmospheric profile, when excluding the in-situ data, results show a mean absolute range of between 1.2 K to 1.8 K over bare soil and 3.3 K to 3.8 K over alfalfa for the different meteorological forcing, with the AIRS profile providing the best reproduction over the studied arid land irrigation region.

Crop height measured from UAVs fitted with commercially available RGB cameras provide an affordable alternative to retrieve field scale high resolution estimates. The study presents an assessment of between flight reproducibility of Crop Surface Maps (CSM) extracted from Digital Surface Maps (DSM) generated by Structure from Motion (SfM) algorithms. Flights were conducted over a centre pivot irrigation system covered with an alfalfa crop. An important step in calculating the absolute crop height from the UAV derived DSM is determining the height of the underlying terrain. Here we use automatic thresholding techniques applied to RGB vegetation index maps to classify vegetated and soil pixels. From interpolation of classified soil pixels, a terrain map is calculated and subtracted from the DSM. The influence of three different thresholding techniques on CSMs are investigated. Median Alfalfa crop heights determined with the different thresholding methods varied from 18cm for K means thresholding to 13cm for Otsu thresholding methods. Otsu thresholding also gave the smallest range of crop heights and K means thresholding the largest. Reproducibility of median crop heights between flight surveys was 4-6cm for all thresholding techniques. For the flight conducted later in the afternoon shadowing caused soil pixels to be classified as vegetation in key locations around the domain, leading to lower crop height estimates. The range of crop heights was similar for both flights using K means thresholding (35-36cm), local minimum thresholding depended on whether raw or normalised RGB intensities were used to calculate vegetation indices (30-35cm), while Otsu thresholding had a smaller range of heights and varied most between flights (26-30cm). This study showed that crop heights from multiple survey flights are comparable, however, they were dependent on the thresholding method applied to classify soil pixels and the time of day the flight was conducted