ABSTRACT

There have been considerable advances in the estimation of land surface environmental conditions from satellite observations, particularly from thermal infrared remote sensing data (Running and Nemani 1988; Carlson et al. 1994; Norman et al. 1995; Prince and Goward 1995; Sun and Mahrt 1995; Andersen 1996; Susskind et al. 1997). Near-surface temperature and water vapor are of critical importance to the study of terrestrial hydrology (Dubayah et al. 2000), biospheric processes (Prince and Goward 1995), and other Earth System Science processes (Ehrlich et al. 1994).