A comparison of data-driven and model-driven approaches to brightness temperature diurnal cycle interpolation

This paper presents two new schemes for interpolating missing samples in satellite temperature cycles. The first scheme, referred to here as the cosine model, is an improvement model proposed by Göttsche et al. (F. M. Göttsche and F. S. Olesen, “Characterization of landsurfaces by modelling diurnal temperature waves extracted from Meteosat-IR data,” in Proceedings of the 9th conference on Satellite Meteorology and Oceanography, (Boston, MA), pp. 426-427, American Meteorological Society, 1998) and combines a cosine and exponential function for modelling the diurnal temperature cycle. The second scheme employs a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space interpolator (N. Aronszajn, “Theory of Reproducing Kernels,” Trans. Am. Math. Soc., vol. 68, pp. 337–404, 1950) for interpolating the missing samples. The application of reproducing kernel hilbert space interpolators to the diurnal temperature cycle interpolation problem is novel. Results obtained by means of computer experiments are presented.