Preliminary Results on the Retrieval of Land Surface Temperature from Msg-seviri Data in Eastern Spain

A preliminary comparison between the Land Surface Temperature (LST) product generated by the LSA SAF and ground measurements carried out in an extensive, flat, unstressed, fully-covering rice field site showed an LST error larger than ±2K. Since then, several issues have been investigated with the aim of reducing error sources in the retrieval of LST from MSG-SEVIRI in Eastern Spain: a) a methodology to generate periodic and regional land cover maps has been suggested after observing classification errors in the land cover maps used by the LSA SAF to estimate surface emissivities, b) angular measurements of surface emission have been carried out to study the angular emission behaviour of land surfaces, which can have a significant effect on LST retrievals at off-nadir viewings, c) an alternative algorithm has been proposed for retrieving LST from MSG-SEVIRI data, and, finally, d) two ground-truth stations have been set up to evaluate the soundness of the LST algorithms.