A Modified Interactive Spectral Smooth Temperature Emissivity Separation Algorithm for Low-Temperature Surface

When ground-leaving radiance from low-temperature surface is similar to downwelling radiance from the sky, the singular values arise in the retrieved land surface emissivity (LSE) at some specific spectral bands. In addition, too many singular values eventually cause temperature/emissivity separation algorithms to fail. To reduce the occurrence of these singular points, we formulate two indices, including the land-atmosphere radiance contrast index (LACI) and neighbor band contrast index (NBCI). LACI characterizes the contrast between surface radiance and sky downwelling radiance. NBCI characterizes the contrast between the radiance at neighboring bands. These two indices are used as filters to select bands which participate in the iterative spectrally smooth calculation. Thus, we modify the iterative spectrally smooth temperature and emissivity separation (ISSTES) algorithm for low-temperature surfaces. Two methods have been used to evaluate the modified algorithm. First, numerical experiments are conducted to evaluate if the modified algorithm can accurately retrieve the “true” LSE from the simulated data. Second, an artificial low-temperature surface cooled by liquid nitrogen is measured to validate the modified algorithm. The results show that the modified algorithm can effectively avoid singular values, and behaves much better than the original algorithm with errors of less than 0.01 in retrieved emissivity when applied to low-temperature regions, while the modified algorithm brings limited improvement in retrieved temperature.