A coupled canopy-soil thermal emission model for forests

The underlying terrain temperature distributions of vegetative and non-vegetative surfaces is a result of complex, time-varying physical processes which compound the interpretation of both long-wave thermal imagery and radiobrightness observations in the passive microwave regime. Forest canopies offer a particular challenge and in this paper the authors describe a coupled canopy-soil thermal emission model which links a time-dependent soil temperature profile submodel with a steady-state vegetation model. Root mean square errors in modeled versus measured canopy temperatures were less than 1.5 degrees C under both cloudy and sunlit conditions.