Use of ATSR data to estimate surface fluxes over land and sea

Dr. Yong XUE, Dr. Sean P. Lawrence and Prof. David T. Llewellyn-Jones

Earth Observation Science Group
Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
Emal: YX1@LE.AC.UK

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to assess the worth of satellite data, regional and 
global surface data in estimating regional and global 
sea-land-atmosphere heat fluxes. In this paper, the models to obtain 
the shortwave irradiation, long-wave radiation, latent heat flux and 
sensible heat flux at Earth's surface from the ATSR thermal band data 
and the new launched ATSR-2 visible and thermal band data have been 
developed. In order to achieve these, a technique for the derivation  
of land surface temperature and land surface emissivity retrieval 
using ATSR data has been proposed. The visible and near-infrared 
reflectance were derived from ATSR-2 visible spectral bands by using 
atmospheric radiative transfer model developed previously.

The models have been applied to the regional ATSR-2 data in UK and  
global scale ATSR data in areas of open sea. Three physical methods 
were used to determine solar irradiance by using ATSR-2 data. A new 
formula has been developed for the calculation of net longwave 
radiation at the surface. The ATSR-2 data sets have been shown to be 
useful in helping to study the large space scale heat flux exchange. 
However, our current analysis is restricted to a small range of 
conditions and needs to be extended to larger data sets.

Keywords: ESA European Space Agency - Agence spatiale europeenne, observation de la terre, earth observation, satellite remote sensing, teledetection, geophysique, altimetrie, radar, chimique atmospherique, geophysics, altimetry, radar, atmospheric chemistry