Temperature and Air Temperature from Meteorological Stations on the Pan-Arctic Scale

• Main Authors: Marcel Urban, Jonas Eberle, Christian Hüttich, Christiane Schmullius, Martin Herold
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: Arctic; Climate change
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.348.3474; http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/5/5/2348/pdf/

Abstract: Satellite-based temperature measurements are an important indicator for global climate change studies over large areas. Records from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) and (Advanced) Along Track Scanning Radiometer ((A)ATSR) are providing long-term time series information. Assessing the quality of remote sensing-based temperature measurements provides feedback to the climate modeling community and other users by identifying agreements and discrepancies when compared to temperature records from meteorological stations. This paper presents a comparison of state-of-the-art remote sensing-based land surface temperature data with air temperature measurements from meteorological stations on a pan-arctic scale (north of 60 ° latitude). Within this study, we compared land surface temperature products from (A)ATSR, MODIS and AVHRR with an in situ air temperature (Tair) database provided by the National Climate Data Center (NCDC). Despite analyzing the whole acquisition time period of each land surface temperature product, we focused on the inter-annual variability comparing land surface temperature (LST) and air temperature for the overlapping time period of the remote sensing data (2000–2005). In addition, land