Application of remote sensing for land surface temperature retrieval over Mecca

A method to retrieve the land surface temperature (LST) over Mecca, Saudi Arabia are developed using band 6 of the Landsat TM thermal channel. The objective of this study was to focus on the estimation of the LST from Landsat TM 5 imageries. The data used was captured by Thematic Mapper (TM) sensor onboard the Landsat 5 satellite. Landsat TM has only one thermal band, and therefore the spilt-window algorithm cannot be used for the retrieval of LST. In this study, we are proposed a single channel algorithm for retrieving LST. The land surface emissivity and solar angle values are needed in order to apply these in the proposed algorithm. The surface emissivity values were computed based on the NDVI values. The correlation between the LST and the brightness temperature had increased significantly after the surface emissivity and solar zenith angle were included in the algorithm. The reference values LST were determined using ATCOR2_T in the PCI Geomatica image 9.1 processing software for algorithm calibration. The results indicate that the single channel algorithm was suitable for retrieving LST values from remotely sensed data.