Metodología geoestadística multivariante para la obtención de imágenes de temperatura de superficie de alta resolución.

Resumen

Thermal infrared (TIR) satellite images and derived Land Surface Temperature (Ts) are variables of great interest in many Earth sciences applications. However, the TIR band has a spatial resolution which is coarser than the other multispectral bands for a given satellite sensor (visible, near and shortwave infrared bands); therefore, the spatial resolution of TIR bands from available satelliteborne sensors is not accurate enough to be used in certain applications. The application of a method is shown here for obtaining land surface temperature images with enhanced spatial resolution, using low resolution thermal images and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). A Ts image with perfect consistency has been obtained by applying this method to a Landsat 7 ETM+ TIR band. This implies that, if the downscaled TIR image is degraded to its original resolution, the degraded image obtained is identical to the original. Hence high spatial resolution Ts images have been obtained without altering the original radiometry. Moreover, the root mean square error for the proposed methodology was lower to 1 Kelvin degree (0.85).