Land Surface Temperature Monitoring LSTM Mission

This presentation was held at the 24^th International SST Users’ Symposium and GHRSST Science Team Meeting (GHRSST24) held in Ahmedabad, India/Online from 16 – 20 October 2023.

Explore the full program at GHRSST24 on the GHRSST Website here.

Abstract

The existing Copernicus space infrastructure, including particularly the Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 missions, already provides useful information for agricultural applications. Although Sentinel-3 routinely delivers global LST measurements, its 1 km spatial resolution does not capture the field-scale variability required for irrigation management, crop growth modelling and reporting on crop water productivity. Therefore, a dedicated LSTM mission is foreseen in the frame of the Copernicus expansion with the following mission objectives:

• Primary objective: to enable monitoring evapotranspiration rate at European field scale by capturing the variability of LST (and hence ET) allowing more robust estimates of field scale water productivity.
• Complementary objective: to support mapping and monitoring of a range of additional services benefitting from TIR observations – e.g. soil composition, urban heat islands, coastal zone management and high-temperature events.

ESA collaborates with partner space agencies to create synergy with relevant international missions such as TRISHNA (CNES, ISRO), Surface Biology Geology SBG (NASA/JPL, ASI) and the Landsat program (USGS/NASA) to achieve optimal temporal coverage of high-resolution thermal observations. This paper provides an overview of the proposed Copernicus LSTM mission including user requirements, a technical system concept overview, Level-1/Level-2 core products description and a range of use cases addressing mission objectives. As the complementary objective also aims to support the coastal water and inland water temperature retrieval, feedback from the GHRSST community is sought for associated data requirements. Key questions are needs for data format, retrieval algorithms and associated auxiliary processing such as cloud masking to assess how these can complement the overall mission objectives.