Retrieving land surface component temperatures using ATSR-2 data

The retrieval of component temperatures from mixed pixel over vegetable-soil system is more valuable than the retrieving of average temperature. However, there are two essential mechanisms such as component thermal radiation and atmosphere correction must be newly considered. A good mathematic scheme should also be employed, which can make use of the ATSR-2 information in order to separate component temperatures. This paper is an attempt for the above topics. We bring forward more appropriate atmosphere parameters and retrieve them by resolving a system of nonlinear equations, which also includes vegetable and soil temperature as unknown variables. To resolve it, Broyden's method is adopted. We use the ATSR-2 imagery on a pilot field in Shunyi county on April 16, 2001 to validate our method, and errors of 2 degC and 1 degC are achieved for soil temperature and vegetable temperature respectively.