Improving Land Surface Temperature Estimation in Cloud Cover Scenarios
using Graph-Based Propagation
Abstract
Land surface temperature (LST) serves as an important climate variable
which is relevant to a number of studies related to energy and water
exchanges, vegetation growth and urban heat island effects. Although LST
can be derived from satellite observations, these approaches rely on
cloud-free acquisitions. This represents a significant obstacle in
regions which are prone to cloud cover.
In this paper,
a graph-based propagation method, referred to as GraphProp, is
introduced. This method can accurately obtain LST values which would
otherwise have been missing due to cloud cover. To validate this
approach, a series of experiments are presented using
synthetically-obscured Landsat acquisitions. The validation takes place
over scenarios ranging from between 10% and 90% cloud cover across
three urban locations. In presented experiments, GraphProp recovers
missing LST values with a mean absolute error of less than 1.1C, 1.0C
and 1.8C in 90% cloud cover scenarios across the studied locations
respectively.