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 Radiomet er (ASTER) to estimate the energy fluxes from the land surface, The ba sic concepts of the energy balance at the land surface are presented a long with an example of how remotely sensed surface brightness tempera tures can be used to estimate the sensible heat. The example is from t he Monsoon 1990 experiment conducted over an arid watershed in Arizona . In this case, surface temperatures derived from an Range aircraft th ermal-infrared (TIR) sensor and vegetation and land use characteristic s derived from a Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) image were used in a two -source model to predict the surface heat fluxes, The agreement with g round measurements is reasonably good for the three days of observatio ns.