Estimation of Land Surface Temperature through Blending MODIS and AMSR-E Data with the Bayesian Maximum Entropy Method

Land surface temperature (LST) plays a major role in the study of surface energy balances. Remote sensing techniques provide ways to monitor LST at large scales. However, due to atmospheric influences, significant missing data exist in LST products retrieved from satellite thermal infrared (TIR) remotely sensed data. Although passive microwaves (PMWs) are able to overcome these atmospheric influences while estimating LST, the data are constrained by low spatial resolution. In this study, to obtain complete and high-quality LST data, the Bayesian Maximum Entropy (BME) method was introduced to merge 0.01 degrees and 0.25 degrees LSTs inversed from MODIS and AMSR-E data, respectively. The result showed that the missing LSTs in cloudy pixels were filled completely, and the availability of merged LSTs reaches 100%. Because the depths of LST and soil temperature measurements are different, before validating the merged LST, the station measurements were calibrated with an empirical equation between MODIS LST and 0 similar to 5 cm soil temperatures. The results showed that the accuracy of merged LSTs increased with the increasing quantity of utilized data, and as the availability of utilized data increased from 25.2% to 91.4%, the RMSEs of the merged data decreased from 4.53 degrees C to 2.31 degrees C. In addition, compared with the filling gap method in which MODIS LST gaps were filled with AMSR-E LST directly, the merged LSTs from the BME method showed better spatial continuity. The different penetration depths of TIR and PMWs may influence fusion performance and still require further studies.