The definition of effective emissivity of land surface at the scale of remote sensing pixels

Abstract

Remote sensing (RS) of land surface temperature (LST) is a very challenging problem at the present development stage of RS science. Tremendous efforts have been devoted to atmosphere correction and temperature emissivity separation (TES) of new LST product algorithms. However, the mechanism of directionality of thermal emission from land surface remains unknown, and even worse, there are confusions on the definition of the effective emissivity of land surface at the scale of RS pixels. The mechanism of directionality of thermal emission for isothermal pixels and non-isothermal pixels is different. For non-isothermal pixels (case in most canopy/soil structures), the directionality of their thermal emission is determined by both bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) derived emissivity and distribution patterns of temperature differences. A new definition is suggested to take into account material mixture, multiple scattering, and temperature variation within thermal infrared (TIR) RS pixels.