Estimation of 1-Km All-Weather Land Surface Temperature Over the Tibetan Plateau

Land surface temperature (LST) immensely affects the energy balance and water cycle on the earth's surface. Merging thermal infrared (TIR) and passive microwave (MW) remote sensing provides the possibility to obtain all-weather LST with moderate resolutions. However, due to difficulties in downscaling MW LST, current methods merging TIR LST and MW LST into such an all-weather LST are limited over large areas with very complicated land surfaces (e.g. the Tibetan Plateau). By fully considering the influence of the topography on estimation of merged LSTs, this study revises the recently-developed physical method for generating the 1-km all-weather LST and applies it over the Tibetan Plateau to merge MODIS (1 km) and AMSR2 (10 km) observations. Results show that the merged LST has accuracy of 0.99 K-3.22 K when validated against insitu LSTs from five ground stations with various land cover types. This study would be beneficial for continuously monitoring LST and improving spatio-temporal resolutions for associated land surface process studies requiring high-quality all-weather LST over large scales.