Downscaling AVHRR land surface temperatures for improved surface urban heat island intensity estimation

Surface urban heat island (SUHI) is a phenomenon of both high spatial and temporal variability. In this context, studying and monitoring the SUHIs of urban areas through the satellite remote sensing technology, requires land surface temperature (LST) image data from satellite-borne thermal sensors of high spatial resolution as well as temporal resolution. However, due to technical constrains, satellite-borne thermal sensors yield a trade-off between their spatial and temporal resolution; a high spatial resolution is associated with a low temporal resolution and vice versa. To resolve this drawback, we applied in this study four downscaling techniques using different scaling factors to downscale 1-km LST image data provided by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensor, given that AVHRR can offer the highest temporal resolution currently available. The city of Athens in Greece was used as the application site. Downscaled 120-m AVHRR LSTs simulated by the downscaling techniques, were then used for SUHI intensity estimation based on LST differences observed between the main urban land covers of Athens and the city's rural background. For the needs of the study, land cover information for Athens was obtained from the Corine Land Cover (CLC) 2000 database for Greece. Validation of the downscaled 120-m AVHRR LSTs as well of the retrieved SUHI intensities was performed by comparative analysis with time-coincident observations of 120-m LST and SUHI intensities generated from the band 6 of the Thermal Mapper (TM) sensor onboard the Landsat 5 platform. The spatial pattern of the downscaled AVHRR LST was found to be visually improved when compared to that of the original AVHRR LST and to resemble more that of TM6 LST. Statistical results indicated that, when compared to 120-m TM6 LST, the root mean square error (RMSE) in 120-m AVHRR LST generated by the downscaling techniques ranged from 4.9 to 5.3 °C. However, the accuracy in SUHI intensity was found to have significantly improved, with a RMSE value decreasing from 2.4 °C when the original AVHRR LST was utilized, down to 0.94 °C in case that downscaling was applied.