Generating daily 100 m resolution land surface temperature estimates continentally using an unbiased spatiotemporal fusion approach

Abstract

Fine spatial resolution (i.e., ≤ 100 m) land surface temperature (LST) data are crucial to study heterogeneous landscapes (e.g., agricultural and urban). Some well-known spatiotemporal fusion methods like the Spatial and Temporal Adaptive Reflectance Fusion Model (STARFM) and the Enhanced STARFM (ESTARFM), which were originally developed to fuse surface reflectance data, may not be suitable for direct application in LST studies due to the high sub-diurnal dynamics of LST. Furthermore, the effectiveness of spatiotemporal fusion methods for LST data has not been thoroughly evaluated in previous studies that only focused on relatively small spatiotemporal extents. To address these limitations, we proposed a variant of ESTARFM, referred to as the unbiased ESTARFM (ubESTARFM), specifically designed to accommodate the high temporal dynamics of LST to generate fine-resolution LST estimates. We evaluated ubESTARFM and ESTARFM against in-situ LST and the ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS) LST across 12 regions throughout Australia, encompassing various land covers and environments. Independent validation showed that ubESTARFM had a bias of 2.55 K, unbiased root mean squared error (ubRMSE) of 2.57 K, and Pearson correlation coefficient (R) of 0.95 against the in-situ LST over 11,290 observations at the 12 sites, all of which were considerably better than those calculated for ESTARFM, being a bias of 4.73 K, ubRMSE of 3.80 K and R of 0.92. When compared to ECOSTRESS data, ubESTARFM LST had a bias of −1.69 K, ubRMSE of 2.00 K, and R of 0.70 over 43 near clear-sky scenes, while ESTARFM LST had a bias of 1.79 K, ubRMSE of 2.68 K, and R of 0.59. Overall, our results demonstrated that ubESTARFM can avoid systematic bias accumulation, substantially reduce uncertainty deviation, and maintain a good level of correlation with validation datasets when compared to ESTARFM. A further assessment underscored the potential of ubESTARFM for application using LST data acquired from geostationary platforms (e.g., Himawari-8), with a mean ubRMSE (R) of 2.22 K (0.97) against in-situ LST over 1327 observations at 3 sites from southeast Australia at the overpass time of MODIS/Terra. This promising method leverages reliable numeric values from coarse-resolution LST while borrowing spatial heterogeneity from fine-resolution LST and has the potential to be coupled with energy balance and/or radiative transfer models thus enabling better farm and/or regional-scale water management strategies to be implemented. Furthermore, both the input and generated LST data, encompassing a comprehensive spatial extent over diverse land covers and climatic conditions, are publicly available for benchmarking future algorithmic refinements.