TRUST-DART: Land Surfaces Temperature and Emissivity Nonlinear Mapping from Non-isothermal Mixed Pixels of Satellite Images with the DART 3D Radiative Transfer Model

Coarse spatial resolution of Thermal Infrared (TIR) satellites hampers measuring the temperature and emissivity of scene elements from space that improves our understanding of land surfaces' thermal behavior. The stringent conditions of current TIR unmixing methods hinder the production of extensive component temperature and emissivity products. To address this, we designed a gradient-based multi-pixel physical model, TRUST-DART, to derive the temperature and emissivity of urban features from non-isothermal mixed pixels of satellite images using the DART 3D radiative transfer model. Unlike traditional TIR unmixing methods, TRUST-DART is not constrained by issues related to spatial, spectral, temporal resolution, angular, scene, field measurement requirements, or manual operations. Its inputs include an at-surface radiance image, downwelling sky irradiance, a 3D urban mock-up with feature information, and DART input parameters such as spatial resolution. It generates maps of emissivity and temperature per urban feature. Its accuracy is validated for two vegetation and urban scenes and two types of images (DART simulated pseudo satellite and ASTER observed images). The accuracy of the TRUST-DART depends heavily on the fraction of components. TRUST-DART proves robust for high-fraction components. However, its accuracy decreases with decreasing fractions. TRUST-DART is distributed with DART and is available for education and research via Toulouse III University (https://dart.omp.eu).