Thermal Infrared Radiance Transfer Modeling of the Urban Landscape at Ultrahigh Spatial Resolution

The land surface temperature (LST) of urban is a key factor in the field of urban environmental monitoring, and thermal infrared (TIR) remote sensing is an efficient method to obtain it. An important assumption of the traditional thermal radiance transfer model is that the land surface is flat, which has now proven difficult to hold under the urban landscape. Most of the existing urban thermal radiance transfer models have been developed for remote sensing images with a spatial resolution of tens of meters. Currently, airborne TIR sensors have the observation capability to acquire remote sensing images with an ultrahigh spatial resolution (1 cm–1 m), and the model needs to be improved. This letter proposed a new ultrahigh spatial resolution urban thermal radiance transfer model (UHURT) after analyzing the transfer processes within the urban canopy at ultrahigh spatial resolution. Various radiance components, the emitted radiance, reflected atmospheric downward radiance, and adjacent radiance, were modeled separately. The results of the traditional model and the UHURT model were compared with those of a ray-tracing computer simulation model, which showed that the new model successfully quantifies the multiple scattering and adjacent effects and obtained images closer to the computer simulation images. Besides, the LST retrieval of the computer-simulated images was performed using the traditional model and the UHURT model, and the proposed model successfully reduced the errors of the retrieval results and weakened the spatial correlation between the residual distribution and the geometric characteristics of the urban landscape.