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Temperature and Emissivity Retrievals From Hyperspectral Thermal Infrared

Data Using Linear Spectral Emissivity Constraint

Article  in  IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing · May 2011

DOI: 10.1109/TGRS.2010.2062527 · Source: IEEE Xplore

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 49, NO. 4, APRIL 2011
Temperature and Emissivity Retrievals From
Hyperspectral Thermal Infrared Data Using
Linear Spectral Emissivity Constraint
Ning Wang, Hua Wu, Françoise Nerry, Chuanrong Li, and Zhao-Liang Li
Abstract—Owing to the ill-posed problem of radiometric equa-
tions, the separation of land surface temperature (LST) and land
surface emissivity (LSE) from observed data has always been a
troublesome problem. On the basis of the assumption that the
LSE spectrum can be described by a piecewise linear function,
a new method has been proposed to retrieve LST and LSE from
atmospherically corrected hyperspectral thermal infrared data us-
ing linear spectral emissivity constraint. Comparisons with the ex-
isting methods found in literature show that our proposed method
is more noise immune than the existing methods. Even with a
NEΔT of 0.5 K, the rmse of LST is observed to be only 0.16 K, and
that of LSE is 0.006. In addition, our proposed method is simple
and efficient and does not encounter the problem of singular values
unlike the existing methods. As for the impact of the atmosphere,
the results show that our proposed method performs well with
the uncertainty of the atmospheric downwelling radiance but
suffers from the inaccuracy of the atmospheric upwelling radiance
and atmospheric transmittance, which implies that an accurate
atmospheric correction is still needed to convert the radiance
measured at the satellite level to the at-ground radiance. To val-
idate the proposed method, a field experiment was conducted, and
the results show that 80% of the samples have an accuracy of LST
within 1 K and that the mean values of LSE are accurate to 0.01.
Index Terms—Emissivity, hyperspectral thermal infrared
(TIR), land surface temperature (LST), linear constraint,
retrieval.
I. I NTRODUCTION
A CCURATE retrieval of land surface temperature (LST)
and land surface emissivity (LSE) is of great im-
portance and has applications in many disciplines [1].
Manuscript received January 8, 2010; revised May 6, 2010 and July 2,
2010; accepted June 13, 2010. Date of publication September 9, 2010; date
of current version March 25, 2011. This work was supported by the Hi-Tech
Research and Development Program of China (863 Plan Program) under Grants
2006AA12Z121 and 2008AA121805.
N. Wang and H. Wu are with the State Key Laboratory of Resources and
Environmental Information System, Institute of Geographical Sciences and
Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101,
China, and also with the Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences,
Beijing 100049, China.
F. Nerry is with the Image Sciences, Computer Sciences and Remote Sensing
Laboratory (LSIIT), CNRS, UdS, 67412 Illkirch, France.
C. Li is with the Academy of Opto-Electronics, Chinese Academy of
Sciences, Beijing 100080, China.
Z.-L. Li is with the State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental
Information System, Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources
Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China, and also
with the Image Sciences, Computer Sciences and Remote Sensing Laboratory
(LSIIT), CNRS, UdS, 67412 Illkirch, France (e-mail: lizl@igsnrr.ac.cn).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TGRS.2010.2062527
0196-2892/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE
1291
Temperature–emissivity separation (TES), as one of the key
problems in thermal infrared (TIR) remote sensing, is attractive,
although many studies have been undertaken on this aspect [1].
However, the retrieval of LST and LSE from space is a difficult
task. First, the radiative transfer equation (RTE) shows that the
radiance emitted from the surface is the function of LST and
LSE. For the given observed radiance at N channels, there
will always be N + 1 (N channel emissivities with one surface
temperature) unknowns, provided that atmospheric effects are
known. Such ill-posed phenomenon makes the solution of the
RTE sets undetermined even for the at-ground radiances. This
is the main difficulty in the retrieval of LST and LSE from
the atmospherically corrected surface radiance. In addition, at-
mospheric perturbation affects the at-ground radiances. The at-
mospheric downwelling radiance and surface-emitted radiance
are coupled together through emissivities. On the one hand, the
nonunity of emissivity reduces the surface-emitted radiance,
and on the other hand, a non-black-body surface reflects the
atmospheric downwelling radiance back into the atmosphere
and compensates partly for the reduction in the surface-emitted
radiance caused by the nonunity of LSE. Moreover, existence
of atmosphere makes the retrieval of LST and LSE more
complicated from the top-of-atmosphere (TOA) measurement,
owing to the intervening atmospheric absorption, scattering,
and emission [2].
During the last several decades, great efforts have been made
to determine LST and LSE from multispectral TIR data [3].
Consequently, many methods have been proposed nowadays,
and some of them have been used operationally to retrieve these
two parameters from space measurements [4]. TES methods
for multispectral TIR data always make some assumptions on
emissivity to reduce the number of unknowns. For example,
normalization emissivity method assumes maximum channel
emissivity values to be constant for all pixels [5], [6]; a two-
temperature method assumes that the emissivities of surface are
time invariant [7]; and a gray-body emissivity method is based
on the hypothesis that the emissivities at two bands are equal
[8]. Some methods are only used to first obtain the relative
emissivity spectrum, such as the spectral ratio method [9] or
the alpha-derived emissivity method [10], and then relate these
relative emissivities to the actual absolute emissivities by the
empirical relationship derived from the analysis of emissivity
of different materials.
Hyperspectral TIR (hyper-TIR) data can provide much more
details on the atmosphere and land surface [11]. Undoubtedly,
1292 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 49, NO. 4, APRIL 2011
it can provide extra constraints to recover LST and LSE with
high accuracy against the multispectral data. Based on the
assumption that typical surface emissivity spectrum is rather
smooth when compared with the spectral features introduced
by the atmosphere, an iterative spectrally smooth TES method
was first proposed by Borel [12] to retrieve LST and LSE from
the hyper-TIR data. This type of method has been studied, im-
proved, and employed by many authors and has been proved to
give satisfactory results [13], [14]. As the spectral emissivity for
this type of method is directly obtained by the inversion of the
RTE, singular points will occur when the radiance emitted by a
black body having the same temperature as a natural surface is
approached to the atmospheric downwelling radiance, and the
occurrence of singular points leads to the difficulty in finding
the acceptable solution in the TES.
Up until now, hyper-TIR data could be acquired by
several sensors onboard satellites, such as the Atmospheric
Infrared Sounder on Earth observing system satellites [15], the
Interferometer Atmospheric Sounding Instrument (IASI) on the
European meteorological operational satellite program
(METOP-A) [16], [17], and Cross-track Infrared Sounder
on the next-generation National Polar-orbiting Operational
Environmental Satellite System [18]. To meet the demand of
fast accurate LST and LSE retrievals from hyper-TIR data
and to overcome some defects in the currently developed
methods, this paper intends to propose a TES method with
a linear spectral emissivity constraint for hyper-TIR data.
Section II is devoted to the description of the theory basis and
the principle of the methodological development. Section III
discusses the accuracy and sensitivity of our method, and in
this part, the errors introduced by the algorithm assumption,
instrument noise, uncertainties of atmospheric downwelling
radiance, upwelling radiance, and transmittance are considered.
Section IV gives a simple comparison between the proposed
and the existing methods. In Section V, the proposed method is
applied to the field measurements, and finally, the conclusions
are given in the last section.
II. P RINCIPLE OF M ETHODOLOGICAL D EVELOPMENT
Before describing the proposed method, a brief recall on the
background of TIR remote sensing is presented. Neglecting the
atmospheric scattering effects, the atmospheric RTE in the TIR
region can be written as [19]
L(λ) = Lag (λ)τ (λ) + Rat↑ (λ)
Lag (λ) = ε(λ)B(λ, T ) + (1 − ε(λ)) Rat↓ (λ)
where L(λ) is the radiance measured at TOA at wavelength
λ, Lag is the at-ground radiance, τ is the atmospheric trans-
mittance, Rat↑ and Rat↓ are the atmospheric upwelling and
downwelling radiances, respectively, ε is the LSE, and B(λ, T )
is the Planck’s function at LST T at wavelength λ, i.e.,
−5
C1 λ
B(λ, T ) =
exp(C2 /λT ) − 1
in which C1 and C2 are the Planck’s constants C1 = 1.191 ×
108 W · μm4 /(sr · m2 ) and C2 = 1.439 × 104 μm · K.
Fig. 1. Sketch map of the piecewise linear emissivity spectra fitting. The
spectra in this figure are a type of soil, the abscissa is the wavenumber, and
the ordinate is the emissivity. The red dot line is the actual emissivity spectrum,
and the blue lines are the fitting spectra.
Herewith, except for the specific statement, atmospheric
correction is assumed to be accurately performed, and we will
focus mainly on the at-ground radiance.
As it has been mentioned earlier, the main difficulty in
retrieving LST and LSE from TIR data is the ill-posed problem,
i.e., N + 1 unknowns are determined from a set of N equations
provided by the N measured radiances. There are generally
two ways to solve this problem. The first one is to reduce the
number of unknowns used to represent the emissivity spectrum.
The second one is to determine an extra equation so that
N + 1 unknowns can be solved with N + 1 equations. The
method proposed in this paper is based on the first one. To
reduce the number of unknowns, one could fit the LSE spectra
with a polynomial curve. However, as LSE is a function of
wavelength, surface components, structure, roughness, and soil
moisture, LSE varies significantly from one surface to another.
It is therefore unrealistic to use some universal coefficients to
fit the LSE spectra across a wide range. A compromise idea is
to use a piecewise linear function to fit the emissivity spectra
for different types of materials.
By assuming that there are N bands in the hyperspectral data,
accordingly, there are N emissivities. As shown in Fig. 1, by
dividing the emissivity spectrum into M sections (segments),
with each section comprising mk bands, the whole spectrum
can be fitted by M lines, similar to the blue lines shown in
Fig. 1. Thus, the emissivity spectrum can be expressed by a
group of linear equations (M sections) as
(1)
  
ε(λi ) ≈ ak λi +bk , k = 1, . . . , M ; i ∈ mk , mk+1
(3)
where ak and bk are the two sets of coefficients of the M linear
functions. It is recommended that mk should be larger than or at
(2) least equal to three, in other words, M ≤ N/3, because a linear
function fitted with only two bands cannot provide additional
useful information to meet the aim of reducing the number of
unknowns.
WANG et al.: TEMPERATURE AND EMISSIVITY RETRIEVALS 1293

By substituting (3) into (1), the N -band at-ground radiances performance. On the one hand, the linear assumption of emis-
can be expressed as a function of the parameters (ak and bk ) sivity may not hold any more in large segment. On the other
and LST hand, the linear parameters may be more sensitive to the noises
if the section is short. We will discuss this problem further in
Lag (λi ) = (ak λi +bk )B(λi , T )+(1−(ak λi +bk )) Rat↓ (λi ), Section III. To use this method simply and conveniently, in this
   paper, the number of bands in each section (mk ) is considered
k = 1, . . . , M ; i ∈ mk , mk+1 . (4) to be the same.
Obviously, introduction of piecewise linear fitting function
makes the ill-posed problem to have deterministic solution III. A LGORITHM ACCURACY AND S ENSITIVITY
because, now, there are N equations to solve 2M + 1 un- TO VARIOUS S OURCES OF E RRORS
knowns (M ak ; M bk + one LST). However, in the retrieval, the This section is devoted to analyze the performance of the
criterion (cost function E) is defined as the sum of square of the proposed method with various sources of errors, including
residual errors of the at-ground radiance between the calculated piecewise linear assumption error, instrument noise at different
and the actual ones, i.e., levels, uncertainty of atmospheric downwelling radiance error,

N and uncertainty of atmospheric correction error. The following
E= (Lag (λi ) − Lag (λi ))2 (5) measures are used to describe the accuracy of the results,
i=1 including the mean value of the difference between the retrieved
and actual temperatures:
where Lag (λi ) is the actual at-ground radiance and Lag (λi )
is calculated using (4) with the parameters (ak and bk ) and 
ND
(Tret,i − Tact,i )
LST. This criterion is decreased when the calculated at-ground i=1
radiances are close to the actual ones. Therefore, the retrievals MeanT = T = (6)
ND
of LST and LSE from hyper-TIR data can be regarded as
working out the LST and coefficients (ak and bk ) of the the standard deviation of the retrieved and actual temperature
piecewise linear function provided by (3), and subjected to difference

minimize the cost function defined in (5). As all the equations  ND

are transcendental, the analytical expression of LST and LSE  (Tret,i − T )2
cannot be deduced from these equations. Therefore, all the 
σT = i=1 (7)
unknowns should be solved iteratively. Fortunately, several ND − 1
methods can be employed to optimize the algorithm, such as
the Newton method or golden section method. the rmse of the retrieved and actual temperature difference

The main idea of the proposed method has been detailed  ND

earlier, and the following steps are needed to retrieve LST and  (Tret,i − Tact,i )2

LSE from atmospherically corrected hyper-TIR data with our rmseT = i=1 (8)
proposed method. ND
1) Find an initial estimate of LST, such as the maximum of and the rmse of the retrieved and actual emissivity difference
the surface brightness temperatures among N bands. 
N
2) Recover the emissivity spectrum using the predicted LST.  
D NM
 (ε − εact,i[j] )2
As LST is known, in each section, there are only two  i=1 j=1 ret,i[j]
parameters (ak and bk ) to be solved with mk bands. rmseε = (9)
N D · NM
Therefore, the least square fitting technique can be
employed. where Tret and Tact are the retrieved and actual LSTs, re-
3) Calculate the first-order partial derivative of the criterion spectively, εret and εact are the retrieved and actual LSEs,
E to LST. respectively, ND is the number of total samples, and NM is
4) Calculate the increment of LST according to step 3). If the number of bands.
this increment is small enough, the procedure is stopped.
Otherwise, return to step 2).
5) Save the estimated LST and the corresponding LSE spec- A. Simulated Data
trum as the retrieval results. The simulated data are mainly used to analyze the sensitivity
It should be noted that there are no additional constraints of the proposed method. Consequently, the atmosphere and
needed to make the piecewise functions continuous, as this will surface circumstances are elaborately considered and selected
make the whole algorithm much more complex. The following to fully cover all possible situations.
analysis and results obtained indicate that it is not necessary to To better depict different atmospheric situations, six MOD-
add new constraints except for the piecewise linear assumption. TRAN standard atmospheric profiles of temperature, moisture,
There is no requirement on the number of M ; thus, even with and ozone have been used. These profiles covering a wide range
one section, the algorithm could be run normally. However, the of bottom atmospheric temperature (257.2–299.7 K) and total
number of bands in each section has an effect on the algorithm column precipitable water vapor (TWV) (0.42–4.08 g/cm2 ) are
1294 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 49, NO. 4, APRIL 2011

TABLE I
M AIN C HARACTERISTICS OF THE S IX MODTRAN
S TANDARD ATMOSPHERIC P ROFILES

regarded to be representative of the normal atmospheric con-

ditions (Table I). Subsequently, the corresponding atmospheric
downwelling radiance, atmospheric upwelling radiance, and
atmospheric transmittance spectra are calculated using the at-
mospheric radiative transfer model 4A/OP (Operational Re-
lease for Automatized Atmospheric Absorption Atlas), which
is a line-by-line model with a spectral domain from 600 to
3000 cm−1 and a spectral resolution of 5 × 10−4 cm−1 [20].
Because of its high spectral resolution, 4A/OP is used to sim-
ulate the spectral radiances which would be measured by IASI
instrument [20] from 800 to 1200 cm−1 (8.33–12.5 μm). Fifty-
four different land surface materials covering soils, vegetations,
and waters are chosen from the ASTER spectral library [23].
For each surface material at each atmospheric condition, the
difference in the temperature between the actual LSTs and the
bottom atmospheric temperature varies from −10 to 15 K in
steps of 5 K for the bottom atmospheric temperature of less
than 280 K and from −5 to 20 K in steps of 5 K for the bottom
atmospheric temperature greater than or equal to 280 K.
B. Error Introduced by Method Assumption
To be precise, piecewise linear fitting function for the emis-
sivity construction is still inconsistent with reality. In other
words, this assumption may lead to new errors on the LST and
LSE retrievals. As pointed out earlier in the method description,
the number of bands (mk ) in each section k may affect the
accuracy of LST and LSE retrievals. A series of experiments
was carried out to analyze the error introduced by the piecewise
linear emissivity assumption and to provide a suggestion on
the segment length. Each time, the length of each segment
(Δυ in per centimeter) was varied, and the noise with differ-
ent levels of NEΔT (NEΔT = 0.0, 0.1, 0.2, and 0.5 K) was
added to the simulated at-ground spectral radiance. To make
the statistics more reliable, the noise was repeatedly added,
and the atmospheric downwelling radiance was kept constant.
Subsequently, our method was applied to these simulated data.
Fig. 2 shows the rmse of the LST and LSE obtained using
our proposed method in function of the segment length (Δυ).
Along with the increase in Δυ, if there is no instrument noise,
the accuracy of the retrieved LST and LSE is reduced. This is
consistent with our common sense that if Δυ is shorter, the
error raised by the linear assumption will be lower. However,
when the noise is added to the at-ground spectral radiance data,
the retrieved errors of LST and LSE are reduced sharply and
Fig. 2. RMSEs of LST and LSE due to the assumption error under different
levels of instrument noises. The abscissa is the length of wavenumber of each
segment.
then remain constant at a certain level. The retrieved errors with
the noise data are larger than that with the noise-free data, and
the latter increase continuously with Δυ; thus, we may infer
that the rmse for the cases with noise-added data should be
increased again if Δυ is large enough, as shown in Fig. 2.
As shown from this figure and considering the fact that the
maximum error of LSE exceeds 0.01 when Δυ is larger than
12 cm−1 even for the data without noise, Δυ = 10 cm−1 may
be the best choice for our proposed method.
It should be noted that we have only tested the best segment
length using the simulated data for a pure pixel (a pixel is only
composed of one material). In most of the actual situations,
although the surfaces are heterogeneous, the effective spectral
emissivity is still smooth enough, and the proposed method
is still valid. To reduce the uncertainty in piecewise linear
fitting and the retrieved errors in LST and LSE, an appropriate
segment length, such as 10 cm−1 , is recommended. Our related
work also points out that the effects of band location on the
retrieval accuracy of LST and LSE could be ignored for Δυ =
10 cm−1 .
C. Method’s Sensitivity to the Instrument Noises
In this section, the at-ground radiances with different levels
of error (NEΔT = 0.0, 0.1, 0.2, and 0.5 K) are simulated
and used to analyze the method’s sensitivity to the instrument
noises. Here, the noises are considered to contain no bias. To
WANG et al.: TEMPERATURE AND EMISSIVITY RETRIEVALS 1295

better check the performance of the proposed method under

different atmospheric situations, the whole simulated data set is
divided into three groups according to the modeled atmospheric
profiles. Atmospheric profiles A2 and A3 (Table I) are taken
as the first group because they both have the high bottom
temperature and high water vapor content, A1 and A5 are
grouped as both have moderate bottom temperature and mois-
ture, and A4 and A6 are grouped to represent the low bottom
temperature and low moisture content. By following the same
procedure described earlier, different noise levels are added to
the simulated at-ground hyper-TIR data.
The results show that our proposed method could produce
accurate LST and LSE from hyper-TIR data if the data are noise
free. In this case, the maximum error of LST is less than 0.1 K,
the mean value of LST error for all atmospheres and materials
is −0.004 K, and the corresponding standard deviation of the
LST error is 0.009 K. Furthermore, the rmse of LSE is 0.0003,
and all these errors are small enough to be neglected.
The accuracy of the retrieved LST and LSE is reduced if the
NEΔT is increased. The rmse values of LST are 0.03, 0.07, and
0.16 K when NEΔT is equal to 0.1, 0.2, and 0.5 K, respectively,
showing that all the magnitudes of rmse values of LST are
less than NEΔT, even when NEΔT = 0.5 K. Consequently, the
proposed method has the ability to be noise-immune. The rmse
values of LSE are 0.001, 0.002, and 0.006 for NEΔT = 0.1,
0.2, and 0.5 K, respectively, and are all small enough to be
neglected.
Fig. 3 shows the histogram of LST errors caused by the
instrument noises. The abscissa represents the difference be-
tween the retrieved LST and the actual LST, and the ordinate Fig. 3. Histogram of LST errors caused by the instrument noise. The abscissa
is the frequency. The blue bars indicate the group A2 and A3, is the LST errors in kelvins, and the ordinate is the frequency. (a) NEΔT =
0.1 K. (b) NEΔT = 0.5 K. mT is the mean value, and σT is the standard
the green bars denote the group A1 and A5, and the red bars deviation of the LST errors. The numbers listed in the figure are in kelvins.
represent the group A4 and A6. mT and σT in the legend
are the mean values and the standard deviation of errors for distribution with no bias. In fact, there are system noises, as
a given group of atmospheres, respectively. It is worth noting well as instrument noise, which could also be band dependent
from Fig. 3 that the mean values of the differences of LST are or wavelength dependent.
all close to zero, irrespective of the value of NEΔT, implying
that our method gives no-bias estimate of LST with different
D. Sensitivity to the Uncertainties in Atmospheric
levels of noise. It can also be found that the accuracy of the
Downwelling Radiance
retrieved LST is higher for the warmer and wetter atmosphere
than for the colder and drier air. Generally, in the process of TES, another source of error
The explanation of the better results for the wetter and must be considered. This is the error of atmospheric down-
warmer atmosphere is not obvious, and some justifications can welling radiance. In this section, TWVs in the atmospheres
be given. As we can see in (5), the cost function is expressed as are scaled to 0.8, 0.9, 1.1, and 1.2 times of the actual ones,
a function of the estimate of LST. Theoretically, it will become while the distribution of the water vapor mixing ratios and the
minimum when the estimated LST is equal to the actual value. temperature profiles are kept the same. In this experiment, we
In the neighborhood of the actual LST, the cost function is a use the atmospheric downwelling radiance obtained from the
concave function to the temperature. When the atmosphere is actual profiles to simulate the at-ground radiance, while the
warmer and wetter, the characteristics of the absorption lines atmospheric downwelling radiances obtained with the scaled
caused by water vapor or other gases are more obvious and TWVs are used in the retrieval. Different levels of instrument
clearer. This phenomenon can deepen the concavity of the cost noise (NEΔT = 0.0 and 0.2 K) have also been added to the at-
function. A deeper concavity of the criterion (cost function) ground radiances.
may give better results to the actual values. When the air With NEΔT = 0.0 K, the rmse values of the retrieved LST
becomes cold and dry, the curve of the criterion may be flatter. are 0.146, 0.064, 0.067, and 0.123 K for the scale factor of
Thus, LSTs are recovered in a wider range. However, this is TWV from 0.8 to 1.2. On the other hand, the rmse values
just a mathematic or theoretic explanation. It should be noted of LSE are 0.003, 0.002, 0.003, and 0.005. With NEΔT =
that both the results obtained and the analysis performed in 0.2 K, the rmse values of the retrieved LST are 0.162, 0.093,
this paper assume that the instrument noise obeys the Gaussian 0.092, and 0.137 K, and those of LSE are 0.005, 0.004, 0.003,
1296 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 49, NO. 4, APRIL 2011

Fig. 4. Histogram of LST errors caused by the uncertainty of atmospheric downwelling radiance and by the instrument noise. The abscissa is the LST errors in
kelvins, and the ordinate is the frequency. (a) NEΔT = 0.0 K and TWV-scaled factor = 0.8. (b) NEΔT = 0.0 K and TWV-scaled factor = 1.2. (c) NEΔT =
0.2 K and TWV-scaled factor = 0.8. (d) NEΔT = 0.2 K and TWV-scaled factor = 1.2.

and 0.006 for the scale factor of TWVs from 0.8 to 1.2. On com-
paring the results obtained in Section III-C, one can conclude
that an accurate estimation of the downwelling radiance is of
more importance than the influence of random noise to retrieve
LST from atmospherically corrected hyper-TIR data using our
proposed method. However, the rmse values of the retrieved
LSE are still very small and could be ignored. To analyze the
errors in detail, the histogram of the LST errors is developed, as
shown in Fig. 4, for the TWV-scaled factors of 0.8 and 1.2 with
NEΔT = 0.0 and 0.2 K.
Fig. 4 shows that, for all situations, the group of A2 and A3,
which represents warm and wet atmospheric conditions, shows
more close-to-zero mean value than the other two groups,
implying that the retrieved LST will be more biased from the
actual values when the air becomes colder and drier. Similar
to the previous analysis, the standard deviation of LST errors
is also larger for the cold and dry atmosphere than that for the
warm and wet atmosphere. All these indicate that the accuracy
of the LST is dependent on the conditions of the atmosphere.
It should be also noted from Fig. 4 that the retrieved LST is
overestimated (underestimated) when TWV is underestimated
(overestimated). The possible reason is that the uncertainty
of TWV introduces a systematic error to the atmospheric
downwelling radiances. As at-ground radiances are composed
of surface-emitted radiances and surface-reflected atmospheric
downwelling radiance, when the downwelling radiance is
underestimated (overestimated), the contribution of surface-
emitted radiances will take a greater (less) part, and thus, the
retrieved temperature will be overestimated (underestimated).
Consequently, the retrieved temperatures deviate from the ac-
tual values.
On comparing Fig. 4(a) and (c) or Fig. 4(b) and (d), it can be
noted that the variation in the instrument noise does not affect
the mean value of LST of each group but has effects on the
standard deviation of LST. Together with the work presented
in the previous sections, we infer that the instrument noise,
which is considered as a Gaussian-distributed no-bias random
noise, mainly affects the standard deviation of the results. The
uncertainty of atmospheric downwelling radiance affects both
the mean value and the standard deviation of the results. In the
actual situation, these two sources of error act simultaneously
on the observed data.
E. Sensitivity to the Uncertainties in Atmospheric Correction
As mentioned in the Introduction, to retrieve LST and
LSE from the at-satellite radiance, one of the most difficult
problems is the atmospheric correction. Inaccurate atmospheric
correction will affect atmospheric transmittance and upwelling
radiance. As atmospheric transmittance and LSE and LST are
WANG et al.: TEMPERATURE AND EMISSIVITY RETRIEVALS
TABLE II
R ETRIEVAL E RRORS OF LST AND LSE C AUSED B Y THE
U NCERTAINTY OF ATMOSPHERIC C ORRECTION
coupled together, an inaccurate atmospheric correction will lead
to a serious deviation from the actual values. As our proposed
method assumes that the atmospheric correction is accurately
performed and, similar to other published methods, is only
applied to the atmospherically corrected at-ground radiance,
the inaccurate atmospheric correction can lead to large errors
in LST and LSE retrievals.
A simple experiment of the analysis of sensitivity of our
proposed method on the uncertainties in atmospheric correction
was carried out. First, we simulated the at-satellite radiance data
using the atmospheric profiles and LSE and LST. Subsequently,
we scaled the water vapor mixing ratio profiles and recalculated
the atmospheric upwelling radiance, downwelling radiance,
and transmittance, similar to that carried out in the previous
sections. Finally, our proposed method was applied to the data
corrected atmospherically using the recalculated atmospheric
upwelling radiance and transmittance.
Table II shows the errors of LST and LSE retrieved using
our proposed method with inaccurate atmospheric correction in
obtaining the at-ground radiance from the at-satellite radiance.
This table illustrates that the accuracy of the proposed method
suffers from the effects of inaccurate atmospheric correction,
 
similar to all published methods. Although no instrument noise
is taken into account, 10% of TWV errors will make the
accuracy of the results far from 1 K, implying that an accurate
atmospheric correction is needed to apply our method on the
satellite data.
In contrast to the aforementioned analysis, the proposed
method on the cold and dry air conditions shows much better
performance than on other conditions. A probable reason is
that, in our simulation, the absolute value of TWV error for
dry air is obviously less than that for the wet air condition. It
can also be found that the results are better when the TWV is
1297
underestimated, and the retrieved temperature shows a trend of
overestimation (underestimation) when TWV is overestimated
(underestimated).
IV. I NTERCOMPARISON OF THE P ROPOSED M ETHOD
W ITH THE P UBLISHED M ETHODS
Up to now, the most widely used idea to separate LST and
LSE from the hyper-TIR data is the spectral smoothness of
emissivity. The basic assumption is that the typical surface
emissivity spectrum is rather smoother when compared with
the spectral features introduced by the atmosphere [12]. On
the basis of this idea, an extra function used to define the
smoothness of the retrieved emissivity spectrum is added as a
constraint. Subsequently, N equations and one constraint are
used to solve out the N + 1 unknowns.
There are many ways to define the smoothness of emissivity
spectrum in the literature. One is the use of the standard devi-
ation of the difference between the computed emissivity and a
three-point boxcar-averaged version of this emissivity [12]
 ⎛ ⎞2

 B 
i+1
 1
E= ⎝ε(λi ) − 1 ε(λj )⎠ (10)
B−A+1 3 j=i−1
i=A
where A and B are the band indices that indicate the chosen
region to perform the retrieval process. Here, the spectral emis-
sivities ε(λ)’s are calculated by directly inverting the RTE, i.e.,
ε(λ) = (Lag (λ) − Rat↓ (λ)) / (B(λ, T ) − Rat↓ (λ)) . (11)
This method is denoted as Borel-97.
Another one is defined by the standard deviation of
the difference between the measured and the simulated
radiance [24]


 1 B
E=  [Lag (λi ) − Lf it (T, ε(λi ))]2 (12)
B−A+1
i=A
where Lf it (T, ε(λi )) = ε(λi )B(λi , T )+(1 − ε(λi ))Rat↓ ((λi ))
and ε(λi ) denotes the three-point smoothed emissivity defined
by ε(λi ) = (1/3) i+1 j=i−1 ε(λj ), and other notations have the
meaning similar to the previous method. This method is de-
noted as Borel-08.
Kanani et al. [14] calculated the sum of the emissivity
difference on each adjacent two bands
 ∂ε(λ) 
E =   dλ. (13)
∂λ 
This method is denoted as Kanani in this paper.
Kanani et al. [14] tested the other form of cost functions,
including second-derivative criteria, high-frequency threshold
in the Fourier domain, etc., and pointed out that all these
criteria statistically led to the same performances [14].
A comparison of the cost functions of the proposed method
with those of the three methods mentioned earlier is shown
in Fig. 5. As shown in Fig. 5(a), if no noise is added to
1298 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 49, NO. 4, APRIL 2011

Fig. 5. Comparison of the criterion (E) function of our proposed method with those of the three published methods for separation of LST and LSE. The abscissa
is the temperature difference from the actual LST value. The ordinate is the logarithm of the criterion. The atmosphere used here is A2. The actual LST is equal
to the bottom temperature of the atmosphere. (a) For the case where the simulated at-ground radiance is noise free (NEΔT = 0). (b) Same as (a), but with
NEΔT = 0.5 K.

the at-ground radiance, all the four cost functions reach their
minimum at the actual temperature value, but it can be observed
that the cost function curves of the three published methods
are discontinuous on the left shoulder. This may be mainly
due to the singular points produced by calculating the spectral
emissivity. These three methods calculate the emissivity in
monochromatic band using (11). When the predicted LST is
equal or near to the effective atmospheric temperature, the
denominator in (11) is near to zero. This phenomenon often
occurs with a cool surface and a warm atmosphere. Although
the occurrence of these singular points does not affect the accu-
racy in LST retrieval, they will make the algorithm more com-
plex to overcome this problem. Nevertheless, as our proposed
method uses the linearly spectral emissivity constraint instead
of calculating emissivity using (11), these singular points do
not occur any more. In fact, as our proposed method has a
smooth cost function, some optimal procedures can be easily
employed to speed up the method. In this paper, we have used
the Newton method to optimize the algorithm. Generally, after
4–8 iterations, the first predicted temperature can converge to
the optimal value, and the time consumption is about 0.01–0.02
s on a 2.0-GHz computer.
For the three published methods, the singular points of the
cost function still exist if the noises are added to the at-ground
radiances [Fig. 5(b)]. The position of the minimum point for
these three methods is farther from the actual LST than that
of the proposed method, implying that our proposed method
is more accurate in retrieving LST and LSE than the three
published methods.
The proposed method and the published methods were Fig. 6. Same as in Fig. 3, but with the Borel-08 method. (a) NEΔT = 0.1 K.
compared using the simulated data. As the spectral smoothness- (b) NEΔT = 0.5 K.
based methods have similar performances [14], we only consid-
ered Borel-08 as an example. Following the same scheme used the minimum point in a specified interval around the initial
in the previous sections to test the performance of our proposed predicted temperature.
method, Borel-08 was applied to retrieve LST and LSE from the Borel-08 was used to retrieve LST and LSE from the same
same simulated data, as we used in our proposed method. As the simulated data, as used in our proposed method. Parts of the
singular points do not make the criterion smooth, the optimal results are shown in Fig. 6. Similar to the results obtained
methods are not suitable for the recovery of LST and LSE. using our proposed method shown in Fig. 3, the warm and wet
Therefore, the LST was retrieved by continuously searching atmosphere produces higher accurate LST and LSE than the
WANG et al.: TEMPERATURE AND EMISSIVITY RETRIEVALS 1299

other groups. On comparing Fig. 3, one can observe that the TABLE III
N INE S URFACE M ATERIALS U SED AS THE VALIDATION DATA [14]
standard deviation of LST error obtained with Borel-08 is much
larger than that obtained with our proposed method. Therefore,
our proposed method can produce more accurate LST and LSE
from atmospherically corrected hyper-TIR data.
In conclusion, the superiority of our proposed method over
other methods can be observed on four aspects. First, the
retrieved algorithm is simply and easily designed and im-
plemented because there are no singular points in the cost
function (E). Second, the use of the optimization method
makes the algorithm more efficient than the others. Third, the
proposed method can produce more accurate LST and LSE
than other published methods if the data include noise. Finally,
the proposed method is noise immune. Nevertheless, similar to
other methods, the proposed method still requires an accurate
atmospheric correction to obtain the at-ground radiance from
the at-satellite radiance.

V. VALIDATION W ITH THE F IELD -M EASURED DATA

The field-measured data were collected from a field cam-
paign that took place in June 2004, for three weeks, at the Office
National d’Etudes et de Recherches Aérospatiales center of
Fauga-Mauzac on the Program Interdisciplinaire de Recherche
sur la Radiométrie en Environnement Extérieur experiment
site [14]. The radiances were measured using a BOMEM
(MR250 Series) Fourier transform interferometer from 750 to
3000 cm−1 [25]. The spectral resolution of the data was 4 cm−1 ,
and the sampling interval was 2 cm−1 . The acquisition time was
6 s (averaging 100 scans). The spectroradiometer, which has a
horizontal line of sight, was held at 1.2 m above the ground and
pointed to a horizontal surface via a 45◦ gold mirror. The total
path length from the surface to the sensor was about 2 m, and
the footprint was 20 cm in diameter.
Eleven samples containing soils, rocks, and manmade ma-
terials were tested in the experiment. Nine of them were se-
lected to validate our method, because there were some errors
in the measured emissivity of the excluded materials in the
laboratory. These nine materials are listed in Table III. A lab-
sphere infragold plate was systematically measured before each
sample acquisition to estimate the environmental downwelling
radiance. A thermocouple fitted in a hole drilled from the rear
side of the reflective panel was used to record the infragold plate
temperature during the experiment. Owing to the high value of
the infragold reflectance, the self-emission term of the plate
was very small, and a large uncertainty in the temperature of
infragold plate could thus be tolerated.
The temporal stability of the surface upwelling radiance
was monitored by a broadband long-wave infrared (LWIR)
Radiometer with a band range of 9.6–11.5 μm (869.6–
1041.7 cm−1 ), while the spatial homogeneity in the spectro-
radiometer’s instantaneous field of view (IFOV) was monitored
using an LWIR camera. All these three instruments were cali-
brated on the same M345 MIKRON black body, shielded from
wind. Comparisons among interferometer-acquired spectra,
simulated radiances, and reference radiometer measurements
showed radiance differences of less than 1% over the whole
spectral domain of interest and throughout the field campaign,
revealing the good radiometric quality of the interferometer
calibration process. More details about the measurements could
be found in [14].
Similar to the simulated data, in this paper, the spectral range
that we focused on was from 800 to 1200 cm−1 for the field-
measured data, which was also an atmospheric window for the
satellite data.
The following measurements could be obtained directly from
the field experiment, including the leaving-surface spectral
radiances of the samples and labsphere infragold plate, both
measured by the BOMEM instrument, the temperatures of the
sample surfaces measured by the broadband LWIR radiome-
ter, the temperatures of the infragold plate measured by the
thermocouple, and the samples’ emissivities and reflectance of
infragold plate measured in the laboratory.
To apply our proposed method to extract LST and LSE from
the field-measured spectral radiances, the environmental down-
welling radiance must be estimated from the measured radiance
of the infragold plate. According to (1), this environmental
downwelling radiance can be estimated using the following
formula:
Lgold (λ) − εgold (λ)B(λ, Tgold )
Rat↓ (λ) = (14)
1 − εgold (λ)
where Lgold (λ), Tgold , and εgold (λ) are the radiance of the in-
fragold plate measured by the BOMEM instrument, its temper-
ature, and emissivity, respectively. Consequently, our proposed
method can now be used because the radiance measured from
the surface and the environmental downwelling radiance are
available. It should be noted that, as the sampling interval of
the field-measured data is 2 cm−1 , five bands are needed to have
Δυ = 10 cm−1 for each segment.
1300 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 49, NO. 4, APRIL 2011
Fig. 7. Comparison of the LST retrieved using our proposed method with the
validating LST for different samples at different times of days.
Fig. 8. Same as in Fig. 7, but for the LST errors.
To obtain the validating LST, the measurements made by
the broadband LWIR radiometer on the samples have to be
corrected for the environmental downwelling radiance. To do
this, first, the at-surface spectral radiance was calculated using
(1) with the estimated environmental downwelling spectral
radiance and the spectral emissivity of sample measured in the
laboratory. Subsequently, the broadband radiance was obtained
by integrating the spectral radiance with the response function
of the radiometer at a given temperature. Finally, this temper-
ature was carefully adjusted until the calculated radiance was
equal to the measured radiance, and this final temperature was
taken as the validating LST of the sample in validation.
Fig. 7 shows a comparison of the LST retrieved using our
proposed method with the validating LST for different samples
at different times of the days. Fig. 8 shows the difference of
retrieved and actual LSTs against the actual LST.
It can be noted that the rmse of LST error is 1.1 K. There are
totally 138 measurements, and the errors of LST are within 1 K
for 111 measurements (about 80% of the total measurements).
Only a few measurements are found to have large LST errors,
with some of them exceeding 3 K. It seems that the large LST
errors are sample dependent. Only two measurements of the
polystyrene sample and four of the SiC sample are observed to
have LST errors within 1 K, and six measurements of the slate
sample are found to have LST errors exceeding 1 K. Excluding
these three samples, the rmse of LST for the remaining samples
is observed to be 0.51 K.
There are several reasons for the large errors of the LST.
First, the uncertainty of the sample emissivity measured in
the laboratory can cause errors of LST estimated from the
broadband LWIR radiometer measurement. This uncertainty
may come from the measurement accuracy but more certainly
from the inherent characteristics of the sample. In fact, in the
laboratory, the spectral emissivity measurements are carried
out with IFOV of a few square centimeters, and the spectral
signature measured over a few square centimeters could not
be representative of the whole sample. Second, in the field,
because of the differences in the IFOV of the interferometer
BOMEM and LWIR radiometer, the two instruments do not
view the same area of the samples, leading to different LST
if the samples are heterogeneous and nonisothermal. Undoubt-
edly, there are also errors in the measurement of LWIR and
the calculation of the validating temperatures. This can also
lead to the mismatch between the retrieved and validating
temperatures.
With regard to the measure of the retrieved LSE, the same
measured quantities used by Kanani et al. [14] have been
employed. The first measure is the mean difference between
the average of all the retrieved emissivities and the emissivity
measured in the laboratory. It can be noted that ΔM/L is
expressed as
1 
ND
ΔM/L = [M [i] − εL [i]] (15)
ND i=1
with
1 
NM
M [i] = εj [i]
NM j=1
where εj [i] is the emissivity retrieved with our proposed
method from the measurement j at the wavenumber i; εL [i]
is the laboratory emissivity at wavenumber i; ND is the to-
tal number of wavenumber in the spectral domain D (D ∈
[800 cm−1 , 1200 cm−1 ]); and NM is the total number of
measurements made on the sample of concern during the ex-
periment [14]. The second measure is the standard deviation of
the retrieved emissivities (σM ) defined by


 1 ND NM
σM =  (εj [i] − M [i])2 . (16)
NM ND − 1 i=1 j=1
For each sample, we have given a general view on the
retrieved LSE in comparison with the laboratory emissivity
measurements at each wavenumber. In Fig. 9, the mean of the
retrieved LSE and the laboratory-measured LSE are plotted
as red and black lines, respectively. The gray lines show the
standard deviation at each wavenumber. It can be noted that the
retrieved emissivity spectrum follows the emissivity measured
WANG et al.: TEMPERATURE AND EMISSIVITY RETRIEVALS
Fig. 9. LSE retrieved from spectral radiance using our proposed method
in comparison with the laboratory emissivity for different samples. The red
lines are the mean of the retrieved spectral LSE. The black lines are the
spectral emissivity measured in laboratory. The gray lines mark the σM at each
wavenumber.
in laboratory to a certain degree, and for wood and water
samples, the spectral emissivity is overestimated throughout the
whole spectrum. Furthermore, it is complicated for polystyrene
sample, and for some unknown reasons, the accuracy is lower
than other samples.
Fig. 10 shows the mean difference between the average of
all retrieved emissivities and the emissivity measured in the
laboratory (ΔM/L ) and the standard deviations of LSE (σM )
1301
Fig. 10. Statistics throughout the whole spectral region on the retrieved LSE
in comparison with the measured ones of each sample. The deviation bars are
centered on ΔM/L . The half-length of the bar is equal to σM .
for each sample. On comparing this figure with that given by
Kanani et al. [14, Fig. 5, p. 12473], the standard deviations
of LSE retrieved by these two methods can be observed to be
nearly the same for each sample, implying that our methods
are consistent. However, our proposed method produces more
accurate LSE and improves the mean value of LSE; for exam-
ple, the mean values of LSE of slate, stone, and SiC samples
are close to zero. Except for wood sample, other samples are
observed to have a mean value within 0.01.
There are always some problems in comparing the retrieved
emissivity from field measurements with the laboratory emis-
sivity measurements. In fact, the interferometer and laboratory
instrument may measure the emissivity at different location of
the samples. Furthermore, the two IFOVs of the instruments are
different, leading to viewing of different areas of the samples by
the instruments. This cannot be avoided when the experiment
is carried out. Thus, some degrees of uncertainty may be
introduced by the incoherence of the different measurements.
Generally, our method is found to perform well with the field-
measurement data. It has been observed that 80% of the samples
have an accuracy of LST within 1 K. Except for wood, other
samples are found to have a mean value of LSE within 0.01.
Although, for some unknown reasons, polystyrene has poor
accuracy both on LST and LSE retrievals, the spectral shape of
the LSE follows the laboratory-measured emissivity to a certain
degree.
VI. C ONCLUSION
As key parameters of land surface, LST and LSE retrievals
from space have been studied for several decades. Nowadays,
the use of hyper-TIR sensors may offer the opportunity to
recover more accurate LST and LSE, because they can provide
detailed spectral information. To take the predominance that ex-
tra constraint can be found using the abundant information pro-
vided by the hyper-TIR data, a new method has been proposed
in this paper to retrieve LST and LSE from atmospherically
corrected hyper-TIR data. This method assumes that surface
emissivity spectrum can be reconstructed by a piecewise linear
line to decrease the number of unknowns. It is worth noting
1302 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 49, NO. 4, APRIL 2011
that accurate atmospheric correction is needed to obtain the at-
ground spectral radiance from the at-satellite radiance. To speed
up LST and LSE retrievals, several optimization methods are
used, such as the Newton method.
A series of sensitivity analysis has been carried out, and the
following conclusions can be made. First, the errors introduced
by the linear assumption of the emissivity can be neglected if
the segment length is well chosen. In this paper, a segment
length of about 10 cm−1 has been suggested. Second, our
proposed method can accurately recover the LST and LSE
from atmospherically corrected hyper-TIR data. The accuracy
of retrieved LST is found to be 0.03 K (0.16 K) at NEΔT =
0.1 K (0.5 K), demonstrating that our proposed method is
noise resistant. Third, the uncertainty of atmospheric down-
welling radiance, i.e., 10% (20%) of the difference of TWV
in the atmosphere, causes an error on the retrieved LST with
a mean value of 0.04 K (0.1 K) and a standard deviation of
0.05 K (0.09 K), and if the atmospheric downwelling radiance
is overestimated (underestimated), the retrieved LST will be
underestimated (overestimated). Fourth, if only the white noises
and uncertainty of atmospheric downwelling radiance are con-
sidered, our method prefers the wet and warm atmosphere
rather than the dry and cold atmosphere, similar to other
published methods. Finally, our method still requires good
atmospheric correction, similar to other published methods. If
the atmospheric effects are not well corrected, the accuracy of
LST and LSE will be significantly deteriorated and become
unacceptable.
When compared with other published methods, our method
is more simple and efficient. As there are no singular points
in the cost function, various optimal methods can be used to
obtain accurate solution. With the Newton method employed
in this paper, our proposed method can process one sample in
0.01–0.02 s on a 2.0-GHz computer. In addition, the proposed
method is noise resistant.
Application of our proposed method to the field measurement
shows that an rmse of LST of 1.10 K can be obtained and
that 80% of the errors of LST are within 1 K. For most of the
samples, the mean value of LSE error has been found to be less
than 0.01.
However, further work should be carried out in the future.
First, more field experiments should be conducted to validate
the proposed method. Second, as the current hyper-TIR satellite
data have low spatial resolution, one should define the physical
meanings of LST and LSE on the pixel scale. Third, our
proposed method, similar to other published methods, needs an
accurate atmospheric correction. The sensitivity analysis points
out that only 10% of the uncertainty in water vapor mixing
ratio in the atmosphere will lead to an error of LST of about 3–
4 K. Thus, how to correct for the atmospheric effects accurately
using hyper-TIR data is another topic to be studied in the
future.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank NOVELTIS, Inc., for pro-
viding the 4A/OP model and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for
providing the JHU spectral library.
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[25] [Online]. Available: http://www.abb.com/product/seitp330/
e3ef488a9eba8e2a85256f970056e111.aspx
Ning Wang received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in
geophysical science and cartography and geographic
information system from Beijing Normal University,
Beijing, China, in 2004 and 2007, respectively. He
is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in
the Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural
Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences,
Beijing.
His research interests include thermal infrared re-
mote sensing, retrieval of atmospheric profiles from
satellite data, and neural networks.
Hua Wu received the B.E. degree in photogram-
metric engineering and remote sensing from Wuhan
University, Wuhan, China, in 2003, the M.S. de-
gree in cartography and geographical information
system from Beijing Normal University, Beijing,
China, in 2006, and the Ph.D. degree in cartography
and geographical information system from the Insti-
tute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources
Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing,
in 2010.
He is currently a Research Assistant with the
Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research. His research
mainly includes the retrieval and validation of surface temperature and emissiv-
ities, and scaling of remotely sensed products.
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Françoise Nerry received the Ph.D. degree in 1988.
Since 1990, she has been with CNRS, Illkirch, France, as a Permanent
Researcher of the Image Sciences, Computer Sciences and Remote Sensing
Laboratory (LSIIT). Her expertise fields are in thermal infrared radiometry and
methodology of physical analysis of remote sensing data. She has been involved
in numerous national and international programs (EFEDA, RESMEDES,
EAGLE, etc).
Chuanrong Li received the Master degree in 1985.
He had a postgraduate study experiment at ITC
from 1988 to 1990 and has been a Senior Visiting
Scholar at CCRS from 1994 to 1995. From 1987
to 2003, he was a Research Scientist of the Remote
Sensing Satellite Ground Station, Chinese Academy
of Sciences (CAS). Since 2003, he joined the Acad-
emy of Opto-Electronics, CAS as Vice President and
Research Scientist. He has also been the Co-Chair
of the China expert team of COPUOS. His main
expertise fields are in remote sensing satellite ground
systems and algorithms of remote sensing image processing. He has published
more than 50 papers and has won the National Scientific and Technological
Advancement Award of China in 2003.
Zhao-Liang Li received the Ph.D. degree in 1990.
Since 1992, he has been a Research Scientist at
CNRS, Illkirch, France. He joined the Institute of
Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Re-
search in 2003. He has participated in many national
and international projects such as NASA-funded
MODIS, EC-funded program EAGLE, and ESA-
funded programs SPECTRA, etc. His main expertise
fields are in thermal infrared radiometry, parameter-
ization of land surface processes at large scale, as
well as in the assimilation of satellite data to land
surface models. He has published more than 80 papers in international refereed
journals.