Thermal Land Surface Emissivity for Retrieving Land Surface Temperature from Himawari-8

Land surface emissivity (LSE) in the thermal infrared (TIR) is an essential parameter in the retrieving land surface temperature (LST) from space. This paper describes the LSE maps in three TIR bands (centered at 10.4, 11.2 and 12.4 mu m) used for retrieving the LST from Himawari-8. Himawari-8, a next-generation geostationary satellite has high spatial and temporal resolutions compared to previous geostationary satellites. Because of these improvements, the Himawari-8 LST product is expected to contribute to the observation of small-scale environments in high-frequency. In this study, the LSE is estimated by a semi-empirical method, which is a combination of the classification based method and the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) thresholds method. The land cover classification information is taken from the Global Land Cover by National Mapping Organizations version3 (GLCNMO 2013). Material emissivities of soil, vegetation and others are taken from the MODIS UCSB emissivity library and the ASTER spectral library. This method basically follows the semi-empirical methods developed by the previous studies, but advanced considerations are added. These considerations are the phenology of vegetation, flooding of paddy fields, snow/ice coverage, and internal reflections (cavity effect) in urban areas. The average cavity effect on LSE in urban canopies is approximately 0.01, but it reaches 0.02 in built-up areas. The sensitivity analysis shows that the total LSE errors for the three bands are less than 0.02. The LSE estimation is especially stable at the vegetation area, where the error is less than 0.01.