Methodology to retrieve land surface temperature from MODIS datafor agricultural drought monitoring in China

This paper takes the MODIS data extensively employed in agricultural drought monitoring as an example to present an applicable methodology for land surface temperature retrieval,with fucos on algorithm selection,parameter determination,and computation processes.Though MODIS data contain 8 thermal bands for earth observation,bands 31 and 32 are especially suitable for land surface temperature retrieval required by agricultural drought monitoring.After comparing their accuracy,two-factor split window algorithm is selected for the retrieval.Then the estimation of the algorithm's essential parameters for the retrieval,especially how to fastly estimate the ground emissivity and atmospheric transmittance from other bands of the same scene MODIS data discussed.Finally an experiment of applying the methodology to the real world for land surface temperature retrieval is conducted.The results from our preliminary applications confirm the applicability of the proposed methodology in retrieving surface temperature parameters from MODIS data required for agricultural drought monitoring in China.