Estimating high resolution evapotranspiration from disaggregated thermal images

- Thermal disaggregation is applied to pairs of MODIS-Spot images.
- Evapotranspiration is estimated at 10 m spatial resolution from disaggregated images.
- Land surface temperature and evapotranspiration are assessed at field and scene scales.
- The methodology could be extended to pairs of Sentinel 2 and coming Sentinel 3 images.

Accurate evapotranspiration (ET) estimations based on surface energy balance from remote sensing require information in the thermal infrared (TIR) domain, normally provided with an insufficient spatial resolution. In order to estimate ET in heterogeneous agricultural areas, we inspect in this paper the use of disaggregation techniques applied to two different sensors, such as MODIS (daily revisit cycle and 1 km spatial resolution in the TIR domain) and Spot 5 (5 days revisit cycle and 10 m spatial resolution in the VNIR bands but no TIR band). Spot 5 images were used as a proxy for upcoming Sentinel-2. The Simplified Two-Source Energy Balance (STSEB) model was used for the estimation of ET. Since no Sentinel-2 images were available yet, images from the Spot 5 Take 5 experiment were used for testing this approach. Results assessment was conducted at two different levels: field scale (using ground data), and scene scale (using Landsat 7-ETM + images as a reference). Validation of both disaggregated land surface temperature (LST) and derived surface energy fluxes was performed. Mean absolute deviations of ~ 2 °C in disaggregated LST were observed at both field and scene scales. At field scale, relative errors of 22% and 19% were obtained for ET at instantaneous and daily scales, respectively. At scene scale, the four components of the surface energy balance equation were obtained with relative errors of 3, 14, 11 and 8% for net radiation, evapotranspiration, sensible heat flux and soil heat flux, respectively, compared to Landsat. The results obtained were compared to the use of the MODIS LST at its original resolution (1 km), which was used also to obtain the surface energy fluxes. As the surface heterogeneity increases the errors in both MODIS LST and ET become more and more significant, compared to the use of the disaggregated images. Although reference images at 10 m spatial resolution were not available at this stage for a more robust comparison, this paper shows the potential of the use of disaggregated LST to estimate ET at 10 m spatial resolution, which is especially attractive in highly heterogeneous areas.