Assessment of Mono- and Split-Window Approaches for Time Series Processing of LST from AVHRR—A TIMELINE Round Robin

Processing of land surface temperature from long time series of AVHRR (Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer) requires stable algorithms, which are well characterized in terms of accuracy, precision and sensitivity. This assessment presents a comparison of four mono-window (Price 1983, Qin et al., 2001, Jiménez-Muñoz and Sobrino 2003, linear approach) and six split-window algorithms (Price 1984, Becker and Li 1990, Ulivieri et al., 1994, Wan and Dozier 1996, Yu 2008, Jiménez-Muñoz and Sobrino 2008) to estimate LST from top of atmosphere brightness temperatures, emissivity and columnar water vapour. Where possible, new coefficients were estimated matching the spectral response curves of the different AVHRR sensors of the past and present. The consideration of unique spectral response curves is necessary to avoid artificial anomalies and wrong trends when processing time series data. Using simulated data on the base of a large atmospheric profile database covering many different states of the atmosphere, biomes and geographical regions, it was assessed (a) to what accuracy and precision LST can be estimated using before mentioned algorithms and (b) how sensitive the algorithms are to errors in their input variables. It was found, that the split-window algorithms performed almost equally well, differences were found mainly in their sensitivity to input bands, resulting in the Becker and Li 1990 and Price 1984 split-window algorithm to perform best. Amongst the mono-window algorithms, larger deviations occurred in terms of accuracy, precision and sensitivity. The Qin et al., 2001 algorithm was found to be the best performing mono-window algorithm. A short comparison of the application of the Becker and Li 1990 coefficients to AVHRR with the MODIS LST product confirmed the approach to be physically sound.