Estimation of the Total Atmospheric Water Vapor Content and Land Surface Temperature Based on AATSR Thermal Data.docVIP

Sensors 2008, 8, 1832-1845 sensors ISSN 1424-8220 ? 2008 by MDPI /sensors Full Research Paper Estimation of the Total Atmospheric Water Vapor Content and Land Surface Temperature Based on AATSR Thermal Data Tangtang Zhang 1, Jun Wen 1,*, Rogier van der Velde 2, Xianhong Meng 1, Zhenchao Li 1, Yuanyong Liu 1 and Rong Liu 1 1 Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou, 730000, P. R. China 2 International Institute for Geo-information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), 7500 AA Enschede, The Netherlands; E-mail: velde@itc.nl * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-mail: jwen@ Received: 7 November 2007 / Accepted: 8 February 2008 / Published: 16 March 2008 Abstract: The total atmospheric water vapor content (TAWV) and land surface temperature (LST) play important roles in meteorology, hydrology, ecology and some other disciplines. In this paper, the ENVISAT/AATSR (The Advanced Along-Track Scanning Radiometer) thermal data are used to estimate the TAWV and LST over the Loess Plateau in China by using a practical split window algorithm. The distribution of the TAWV is accord with that of the MODIS TAWV products, which indicates that the estimation of the total atmospheric water vapor content is reliable. Validations of the LST by comparing with the ground measurements indicate that the maximum absolute derivation, the maximum relative error and the average relative error is 4.0K, 11.8% and 5.0% respectively, which shows that the retrievals are believable; this algorithm can provide a new way to estimate the LST from AATSR data. Keywords: Land surface temperature, Total atmospheric water vapor content, AATSR, Retrieval, MODIS, the Loess Plateau  Sensors 2008, 8 1833 1. Introduction Land surface temperature (LST) plays an important role in land-surface processes on a regional as well as on a