Mapping the Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Europe’s Land Surface Temperatures

The land surface temperature (LST) drives many terrestrial biophysical processes and varies rapidly in space and time primarily due to the earth's diurnal and annual cycles. Models of the diurnal and annual LST cycle retrieved from satellite data can be reduced to several gap-free parameters that represent the surface's thermal characteristics and provide a generalized characterization of the LST temporal dynamics. In this letter, we use such an approach to map Europe's annual and diurnal LST dynamics. In particular, we reduce a five-year time series (2009-2013) of diurnal LST from the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI) to 48 sets of half-hourly annual cycle parameters (ACPs), namely, the mean annual LST, the yearly amplitude of LST, and the LST phase shift from the spring equinox. The derived data provide a complete representation of how mainland Europe responds to the heating of the sun and the nighttime LST decay and reveal how Europe's biogeographic regions differ in that respect. We further argue that the SEVIRI ACP can provide an observation-based spatially consistent background for studying and characterizing the thermal behavior of the surface and also a data set to support climate classification at a finer spatial resolution.