Introduction

The Earth science research community and even the general public are widely familiar with thermal infrared (TIR) remote sensing data, but the virtue and applicability of these data still remain in many ways an enigma. The research community is aware of TIR data from scientific publications and presentations that have described the analyses and results from working with TIR data for Earth science-related research; for example, in providing measurements of surface thermal properties of geologic materials or of land surface thermal energy fluxes for forest, agricultural, or other landscape attributes. The public is aware of TIR data from television broadcasts that show these data as part of weather forecasts and even from night-time thermal images showing heat loss from their homes. Still, the utility of TIR remote sensing data has not been fully realized by the larger scientific community because of a number of perceptions – or misconceptions – that have prevented the broader usage of TIR data for research on Earth processes, particularly those related to land surface processes. With the launch of the NASA Terra suite of Earth remote sensing instruments in 1999, a number of which have thermal IR sensors, TIR data are becoming much more readily available than in the past. With the increasing availability of these data, it appears that TIR data are poised to become a major source of quantitative and qualitative information on land surface processes and for their characterization, analysis, and modeling.