Estimation of Thermal Iner tia from Remotely Sensed Data: Cur r ent Status and Futur e Per spective
遥感估算热惯量研究的回顾与展望

Thermal inertia is one of the important factors affecting surface temperature change and can be used in several disciplines for such purposes as discrimination of geologic materials, soil moisture determination, identification of crop stress in moisture deficient areas et al. With the advancement of the algorithms to retrieve land surface temperature from thermal infrared data, accurately to estimate thermal inertia from satellite data. This paper reviews the main algorithms and approaches estimate the thermal inertia from thermal satellite data, including method of day/night temperature difference, method of temperature difference between sunset and sunrise and method using the model inversion. Among these methods, the method of day/night temperature difference is analyzed in more detail. On the basis of the comprehensive analysis and review of the advantages and disadvantages of each method, this paper put forward some research directions in the future to improve the accuracy of thermal inertia estimated from space, including mechanism research, scale proplem and use of multi-temporal and multi-spectral data.