High-resolution urban thermal sharpener (HUTS)

A high resolution urban thermal sharpener (HUTS) was developed that increases the resolution of thermal infrared (TIR) data to that of visible and near infrared (VNIR) data by fitting the relationship between radiometric surface temperature, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and surface albedo (α). HUTS was applied to TIR data aggregated to 90 m to represent a satellite acquired dataset and validated against the measured 10 m data from an aircraft over San Juan, Puerto Rico. HUTS sharpening reduced the root mean square error of surface temperature at the high resolution by 17% compared to no sharpening and outperformed other sharpening methods. HUTS is proposed as a useful tool to study urban meteorology and climatology at the microscale using ASTER satellite data.

Research Highlights
► The relationship between albedo, NDVI, and land surface temperature (LST) in an urban area is examined.
► We develop a sharpening method (HUTS) for low resolution LST satellite data based on higher resolution albedo and NDVI.