Retrieval of surface temperature from the MSG‐SEVIRI observations: Part I. Methodology

Abstract

The land surface temperature diurnal (LSTD) cycle is an important climate parameter because of its control of the upward terrestrial radiation and energy exchange between the earth surface and the atmosphere. It is highly variable in time and space and polar orbiting satellites are not able to capture this variability. Observations from the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI) on the METEOSAT Second Generation (MSG) satellite are available at 15‐min intervals at a resolution of 3 km in four relevant channels. Presented here is a newly developed four‐channel surface temperature (ST) algorithm based on the characteristics of the SEVIRI three‐window thermal channels (8.7, 10.8, 12.0 µm) and one middle‐infrared (MIR) channel (3.9 µm) and radiative transfer model simulations. The proposed algorithm is compared with various split‐window type algorithms and shows improvements in the determination of ST.

Acknowledgements

We thank Yves Govaerts from EUMETSAT and Juan Graupera from the EUMETSAT Archive for providing the SEVIRI image and cloud mask data. The ground observations data for the Netherlands were provided by the ‘Haarweg Team’ of Meteorology and Air Quality of Wageningen University and Laurent Vuilleumier provided observations for Payerne, Switzerland. Support from NASA grant NNG05GB35G for the Coordinated Enhanced Observing Period (CEOP) activity is greatly appreciated. We also thank the reviewers for helpful comments.