Mapping finer‐resolution land surface emissivity using Landsat images in China

Land surface emissivity is a crucial parameter for obtaining the land surface temperature and estimating the land surface energy budget from remote sensing data. The current emissivity products always have a coarser spatial resolution than the products from the visible and near-infrared data. This study focused on the generation of an emissivity product at a spatial resolution of 30 m using a new global land cover product called Finer Resolution Observation and Monitoring of Global Land Cover (FROM-GLC) and Landsat images. Summer-average emissivity products in four narrowbands (Landsat 5/ Thematic Mapper (TM) Band 6, Landsat 7/ Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus(ETM+) Band 6, Landsat 8 Thermal Infrared Sensor bands 1 and 2) and two broadbands (3–14 μm and 8–13.5 μm) were produced in China. Results illustrated that the narrowband emissivities ranged from 0.95 to 0.99, whereas the broadband emissivities ranged from 0.93 to 0.99 in the study area. Inter-comparisons in different places showed that the new emissivity was close to Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) emissivity with a difference of about 0.015 for narrowband emissivity and about 0.02 for broadband emissivity on a regional scale. For application purposes, the emissivities were released in the Worldwide Reference System 2 and geographic coordinate systems with several spatial resolutions resampled from its original scale of 30 m.