Awards: Second Prize of 2019 State Natural Science Award

Lead researchers: Li Zhaoliang, Tang Bohui, Tang Ronglin, Zhou Chenghu, and Wu Hua

Based on the remote sensing radiation transmission mechanism and focusing on mechanism revealing, innovation methods, and model construction, researchers systematically carried out research on the theory and method of thermal infrared remote sensing inversion of surface temperature and net surface radiation and evapotranspiration, making breakthroughs in atmospheric effect correction, inversion, and full remote sensing modeling. 

The research created a "universal split window method" for remote sensing of surface temperature, achieving the industry's long-term goal of an inversion accuracy better than one degree (Figure 1); created the "two-stage separation method" with reversible remote sensing surface parameters only; and established the "trapezoidal feature space" theory and method of remote sensing inversion of evapotranspiration and emission, making effective separation of evaporation and transpiration possible (Figure 2).

Eight representative papers derived from this project have been published in authoritative journals, and they have been cited 1,217 times, including 888 times on SCI journal papers. Four papers are highly cited papers (Top 1%) in the ESI database.

Fig. 1 Validation of land surface temperature from remotely sensed data

Fig. 2 Schematic diagram of the end-member-based soil and vegetation energy partitioning approach for estimating soil and vegetation energy fluxes