COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF SPLIT-WINDOW ALGORITHMS FOR ESTIMATING SOIL TEMPERATURE

the ability to estimate soil temperature (ts) from satellite information is highly useful, since this is one of the main input variables in various models designed for estimating biophysical parameters. a comparative analysis is made of various split-window algorithms used to estimate soil temperature from data provided by the advanced very high resolution radiometer (avhrr) sensor on board of satellites of the national oceanic and atmospheric administration (noaa). the algorithms compared are those proposed by: prata and platt (1991); uliveri et al. (1992); sobrino et al. (1993); caselles et al. (1997); sobrino and raissouni (2000). the temperature estimates were validated with data of the soil temperature in situ recorded in a data logger installed in a meteorological station belonging to la araucania region, chile. the results showed that the algorithm proposed by sobrino and raissouni (2000) come the closest to the in situ data. however, there are no statistically significant differences between the different algorithms evaluated.