Assessment of winter season land surface temperature in the Himalayan regions around the Kullu area in India using landsat-8 data

Abstract

In this study, we propose a modified thresholds method for the determination of land surface emissivity (LSE) for snow covered mountainous areas. The conventional Normalized Differenced Vegetation Index (NDVI) thresholds method (NDVI^THM) does not discriminate the snow covered pixels with soil pixels in assigning the LSE based on NDVI thresholds. In the proposed approach, we incorporate different thresholding rules based on the Normalized Differenced Snow Index and the S3 index for incorporating separability in the LSE for the snow covered pixels. The LSE thus derived is used to determine the land surface temperature using the Single Channel Method. The approach was evaluated for a study area around the Kullu Valley in the lower Indian Himalayas for a dataset of the winter season of Landsat-8 multispectral data. The observed coefficient of determination values indicated that the proposed method yielded better results with respect to the conventional NDVI^THM approach.

Keywords:

• land surface temperature
• snow
• emissivity
• Landsat-8
• Sentinel-3

Acknowledgements

This research is partly supported by the Department of Science and Technology, Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India through Project no. DST-CE-2016056. Further, we also thank NASA for providing the ASTER Spectral Library (https://speclib.jpl.nasa.gov/).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).