Validation of the Results of the Satellite Monitoring of Land Surface Temperature

A. B. Uspenskii, A. V. Kukharskii, and S. A. Uspenskii

Considered are the methods for analyzing the reliability (validation) of the estimates of land surface temperature Ts retrieved from the data of polar orbiting and geostationary meteorological satel lites. Given is a brief description of the satellite payload (scanning radiometers) and algorithms of re- mote determination of Ts from the satellite data. For validating the satellite estimates of Ts it is proposed to use the cross-validation procedure, i.e., the comparison with independent satellite estimates of Ts for which the error level is known. Presented are the results of cross-validation of two independent satellite estimates of retrieved Ts from the data of SEVIRI/Meteosat-10, MODIS/Terra, and Aqua instruments. Such procedure can be applied to validate the estimates of Ts which are planned to be retrieved from the data of Meteor-M and Elektro-L Russian meteorological satellites. Demonstrated is the limited suitability of standard in situ observations of soil temperature at the network of weather stations for validating the satellite estimates of Ts.