The relationship between urban land surface material fractions and brightness temperature based on MESMA

Abstract

The relationship between urban land surface material fractions (ULSMFs) and brightness temperature has long attracted attention in research on urban environments. In this paper, a multiple endmember spectral mixture analysis (MESMA) method was applied to extract vegetation-impervious surface-soil (V-I-S) fractions in each pixel, and the surface brightness temperature was derived by using the radiation in the upper atmosphere, on the basis of Landsat 8 images. Then, a clustering analysis, ternary triangular chart (TTC), and a multivariate statistical analysis were applied to ascertain the relationship between the fractions in each pixel and the land surface brightness temperature (LSBT). The hypsometric TTC, as well as the geographical distribution features of the LSBT, revealed that the changes in LSBT were associated with the high fractions of impervious surfaces (or vegetation), in addition to the temperature distribution differences across locations with varying land-cover types. The data fitting results showed that the comprehensive endmember fractions of V-I-S explained 98.6% of fluctuating LSBT, and the impervious surface fraction had a positive impact on the LSBT, whereas the fraction of vegetation had a negative impact on the LSBT.