A Method for Angular Normalization of Land Surface Temperature Products Based on Component Temperatures and Fractional Vegetation Cover

The angular effect is a primary obstacle for wide applications of land surface temperature (LST) products. Current directional thermal radiation models do not fully consider the difference between visible/near infrared and thermal radiative, i.e. thermal inertial effect, and are not practical enough. Therefore, this study proposed a practical method for angular normalization of LST products based on the component temperature and fractional vegetation cover (FVC). Analyzing with simulated data indicated that the proposed method could improve the LST retrieval accuracy caused by angular effect from 1.2 K to 0.8 K. In addition, the retrieval accuracy of component temperature would affect the performance of the proposed method whereas the retrieval accuracy of component emissivity had almost no effect on the performance.