Improvement of COMS land surface temperature retrieval algorithm by considering diurnal variation of air temperature

Land Surface Temperature (LST) has been operationally retrieved from the Communication, Ocean, and Meteorological Satellite (COMS) data by the spilt-window method (CSW_v2.0) developed by Cho et al. (2015). Although the CSW_v2.0 retrieved the LST with a reasonable quality compared to the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) LST data, it showed a relatively poor performance for the strong inversion and lapse rate conditions. To solve this problem, the LST retrieval algorithm (CSW_v2.0) was updated using the simulation results of radiative transfer model (MODTRAN 4.0) by considering the diurnal variations of air temperature. In general, the upgraded version, CSW_v3.0 showed a similar correlation coefficient between the prescribed LSTs and retrieved LSTs (0.99), the relatively smaller bias (from -0.03 K to-0.012 K) and the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) (from 1.39 K to 1.138 K). Particularly, CSW_v3.0 improved the systematic problems of CSW_v2.0 that were encountered when temperature differences between LST and air temperature are very large and/or small (inversion layers and superadiabatic lapse rates), and when the brightness temperature differences and surface emissivity differences were large. The bias and RMSE of CSW_v2.0 were reduced by 10-30% in CSW_v3.0. The indirect validation results using the MODIS LST data showed that CSW_3.0 improved the retrieval accuracy of LST in terms of bias (from -0.629 K to -0.049 K) and RMSE (from 2.537 K to 2.502 K) compared to the CSW_v2.0.