Monitoring land surface fluxes using ASTER observations

This paper presents a review of methods for using remotely sensed data from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) to estimate the energy fluxes from the land surface. The basic concepts of the energy balance at the land surface are presented along with an example of how remotely sensed surface brightness temperatures can be used to estimate the sensible heat. The example is from the Monsoon 1990 experiment conducted over an arid watershed in Arizona. In this case, surface temperatures derived from an aircraft thermal-infrared (TIR) sensor and vegetation and land use characteristics derived from a Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) image were used in a two-source model to predict the surface heat fluxes. The agreement with ground measurements is reasonably good for the three days of observations.