Downwelling longwave radiation and sensible heat flux observations are critical for surface temperature and emissivity estimation from flux tower data

Land surface temperature (LST) is a preeminent state variable that controls the energy and water exchange between the Earth’s surface and the atmosphere. At the landscape-scale, LST is derived from thermal infrared radiance measured using space-borne radiometers. In contrast, plot-scale LST estimation at flux tower sites is commonly based on the inversion of upwelling longwave radiation captured by tower-mounted radiometers, whereas the role of the downwelling longwave radiation component is often ignored. We found that neglecting the reflected downwelling longwave radiation leads not only to substantial bias in plot-scale LST estimation, but also have important implications for the estimation of surface emissivity on which LST is co-dependent. The present study proposes a novel method for simultaneous estimation of LST and emissivity at the plot-scale and addresses in detail the consequences of omitting down-welling longwave radiation as frequently done in the literature. Our analysis uses ten eddy covariance sites with different land cover types and found that the LST values obtained using both upwelling and downwelling longwave radiation components are 0.5–1.5 K lower than estimates using only upwelling longwave radiation. Furthermore, the proposed method helps identify inconsistencies between plot-scale radiometric and aerodynamic measurements, likely due to footprint mismatch between measurement approaches. We also found that such inconsistencies can be removed by slight corrections to the upwelling longwave component and subsequent energy balance closure, resulting in realistic estimates of surface emissivity and consistent relationships between energy fluxes and surface-air temperature differences. The correspondence between plot-scale LST and landscape-scale LST depends on site-specific characteristics, such as canopy density, sensor locations and viewing angles. Here we also quantify the uncertainty in plot-scale LST estimates due to uncertainty in tower-based measurements using the different methods. The results of this work have significant implications for the combined use of aerodynamic and radiometric measurements to understand the interactions and feedbacks between LST and surface-atmosphere exchange processes.