ESTIMATION OF AIR TEMPERATURE USING REMOTE SENSING BASED ON THERMAL DIFFUSIVITY APPROACH

Abstract

The measurement of air temperature usually used thermometer in the meteorology or climate station under Bureau of Meteorology and Geophysics. In Indonesia, there are some limitations in air temperature measurement and then they could not provide the spatial high resolution information. The measurement of air temperature is very important for analyzing the human comfort, photosynthesis, and vegetation growth which we need saome details spatial information. However, when data were sparse, the underlying assumptions about the variation among sampled points often differed and the choice of interpolation method and parameters then became critical. Often though data may be too sparse to use any of the interpolation methods, alternate ways to derive spatially representative values of air temperature need to researched. The data that could provide spatial information are remote sensing. The objective of this research is to estimate air temperature using remote sensing data (NOAA/AVHRR and LANDSAT/TM), based on thermal diffusivity approach. The steps of this research include the calibration of surface temperature, the determination of amplitude, and the estimation of air temperature. Based on this research, the best equation to calculate surface temperature from NOAA AVHRR is Ulivieri et al equation. This equation shows the higher correlation between surface temperatures from NOAA/AVHRR and the observation in the field than the other equation. Physically, this research could estimate air temperature from satellites data, but statistically, this research has not enough significancy to describe the field observation. Keywords: physical model, temperature, remote sensing.