Atmospheric corrections of passive microwave data for estimating land surface temperature

Quantitative analysis of the atmospheric effects on observations made by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) has been performed. The differences between observed brightness temperatures at the top of the atmosphere and at the bottom of the atmosphere were analyzed using a database of simulated observations, which were configured to replicate AMSR-E data. The differences between observed brightness temperatures at the top of the atmosphere and land surface-emitted brightness temperatures were also computed. Quantitative results show that the atmosphere has different effects on brightness temperatures in different AMSR-E channels. Atmospheric effects can be neglected at 6.925 and 10.65 GHz, when the standard deviation is less than 1 K. However, at other frequencies and polarizations, atmospheric effects on observations should not be neglected. An atmospheric correction algorithm was developed at 18.7 GHz vertical polarization, based on the classic split-window algorithm used in thermal remote sensing. Land surface emission can be estimated with RMSE = 0.99 K using the proposed method. Using the known land surface emissivity, Land Surface Temperature (LST) can be retrieved. The RMSE of retrieved LST is 1.17 K using the simulated data.