A novel approach to estimate land surface temperature from landsat top-of-atmosphere reflective and emissive data using transfer-learning neural network

Land Surface Temperature (LST) is a crucial parameter in studies of urban heat islands, climate change, evapotranspiration, hydrological cycles, and vegetation monitoring. However, conventional satellite-based approaches for LST retrieval often require additional data like land surface emissivity (LSE). Meanwhile, traditional machine learning (ML) techniques face challenges in acquiring representative training data and leveraging data from varied sources effectively. To address these issues, we introduce a novel transfer-learning (TL) neural network approach for LST retrieval using top-of-atmosphere (TOA) reflective and emissive data from Landsat. This method not only improves LST retrieval by integrating various data types but also demonstrates the potential of shortwave data in surrogating LSE information, thereby reducing dependence on explicit LSE data. Our TL approach utilized extensive simulations from the radiative transfer model (RTM) and measurements from the real world. The simulations are comprehensive, covering a wide range of atmospheric and surface scenarios, and the inclusion of real-world data mitigates the discrepancy between simulations and actual observations. When applied to a decade of Landsat-8 observations and ground measurements from 241 stations across diverse regions, our TL method significantly outperforms ML, single-channel (SC), and split-window (SW) algorithms in terms of root mean square error (RMSE), with improvements of 0.46 K, 0.84 K, and 0.57 K, respectively. This superiority underscores the advantage of integrating simulated and observed data, as well as the benefit of utilizing both reflective and emissive data without relying on uncertain LSE inputs. Our findings present a promising new TL framework for estimating LST directly from TOA data, offering a robust approach that we have made publicly available through Google Earth Engine (GEE) for broader use. The LST data retrieved by our proposed method can provide valuable insights for environmental research.