Land surface temperature downscaling in the karst mountain urban area considering the topographic characteristics

To obtain high-spatial-resolution land surface temperature (LST) in karst areas, it is necessary to select a downscale regression model with a better simulation effect and the scale factors that can best represent the topographic characteristics of karst mountainous areas. In Guiyang, a typical karst mountain city, two areas are selected as the study area, which is dominated by natural surface and construction land. Based on the data of Landsat-8 Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS), Sentinel-2, Advanced Land Observing Satellite Digital Elevation Model (ALOS DEM), and meteorological stations, the scale factors representing bare land: bare soil index and topographic relief: mountain shadow (hillshade), relief degree of land surface (RDLS), solar incident angle, and sky view factor (SVF) are added on the basis of the conventional factors. At the same time, random forest (RF) and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) models are used to construct an LST downscaling method that is more suitable for karst mountain cities. After the above steps, the LST product with a spatial resolution of 10 m is finally estimated. The results show that, due to the characteristics of large elevation variation, fragmentation, and high heterogeneity of surface landscape in karst areas, digital elevation model (DEM), RDLS, and SVF factors need to be considered in the downscaling of surface temperature, and the contribution rates of these factors are all more than 6% in the model. In terms of accuracy evaluation of ground temperature, XGBoost model has the highest accuracy with an average absolute error of 1.67K, RF model has an average error of 1.90K, and thermal image sharpening has the worst accuracy with an average error of 2.41K. In terms of accuracy evaluation of ascending scale, the XGBoost model also shows higher accuracy and richer texture details. The research results can provide basic data for the acquisition of high-resolution LST and its intermediate parameters in this area and also provide a method reference for the reduction of high-resolution LST in similar areas. (C) 2022 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)