Correlation of Land Surface Temperature and air temperature with albedo in Maritime Antarctica using MODIS and in situ data.

In this work, we analyze the relationship between albedo and temperature using albedo and Land Surface Temperature (LST) MODIS collection 6 (C6) and in situ data at Livingston Island, Maritime Antarctica. It is known that the relationship between temperature and albedo could have an important impact on global climate models, especially in places where permafrost distribution is complex, as in the South Shetland Islands (SSI) archipelago. Our results show that LST is not well correlated with albedo, which is consistent with the fact that air temperature (Ta) and surface temperature (Ts) do not separately explain the albedo drop, as previous work in the study area has shown. The best agreement was obtained between Aqua and Terra LST and in situ albedo, while the comparison between albedo MODIS and LST yields the worst results, which could be due to the difference in pixel size of MODIS albedo and LST products (500 m and 1000 m, respectively). However, for Ta versus albedo for all data, the decreasing slope of the fit suggests that higher temperatures are associated with lower snow albedo values. This reaffirms the idea that in polar areas, due to their characteristics, the decrease in snow albedo depends not only or mainly on temperature, but also on multiple factors such as the evolution of snow grain size and precipitation rates, among others.