Simultaneous measurements of skin sea surface temperature and sea surface emissivity from a single thermal imagery

A novel method, to our knowledge, to measure simultaneously the thermal emissivity and skin temperature of a sea surface has been developed. The proposed method uses an infrared image that includes a sea surface and a reference object located near the surface. By combining this image with sky radiation temperature, we retrieve both skin sea surface temperature and sea surface emissivity from the single infrared image. Because the method requires no knowledge of thermal radiative properties of actual sea surfaces, it can be used even for a contaminated sea surface whose emissivity is hard to determine theoretically, e.g., oil slicks or slicks produced by biological wastes. Experimental results demonstrate that the estimated emissivity agrees with the theoretical prediction and, also, the recovered temperature distribution of skin sea surface has no appreciable high-temperature area that is due to reflection of the reference object. The method allows the acquisition of match-up data of radiometric sea surface temperatures that precisely correspond to the satellite observable data. (C) 2002 Optical Society of America.