An Assessment of the Accuracy of Land Surface Temperature Determination from the GMS-5 VISSR

The Japanese Geostationary Meterological Satellite 5 (GMS-5) carries the Visible and Infrared Spin Scan Radiometer (VISSR), which has two thermal infrared channels within the “so-called” atmospheric window. These channels are similar to the split-window channels of the AVHRR-2 and are potentially useful for determining surface temperatures. The purpose of the present work is to determine the accuracy of land surface temperatures derived from the GMS-5 VISSR. For a period of 10 clear days during March 1997 hourly digital data from the GMS-5 VISSR are analyzed over two ground-truth sites in Australia. The satellite and ground-truth data are used to test the efficacy of a variety of published land surface temperature (LST) algorithms. NOAA AVHRR-2 data are also used to compare and contrast the accuracies of the LST estimates from these instruments. The results show that LST can be determined from the GMS-5 VISSR to root-mean-squared accuracy of 2–3°C with little bias. Two land surface temperature algorithms are validated and presented for use with the GMS-5 VISSR split-window radiances.