Estimation of land surface temperature, atmospheric moisture deficit and rainfall with using satellite data

In this study, land surface temperature, atmospheric moisture deficit and rainfall were calculated as monthly average and maps were drawn by using AVHRR data of NOAA-12, NOAA-14 and NOAA-15 satellites for 2002. First of all, Turkey?s land surface temperature values were calculated with monthly average by using six different Split Window Algorithms which do calculations related to emissivity [Price (1984), Becker and Li (1990), Prata and Platt (1991), Vidal (1991), Ulivieri et al. (1992), Sobrino et al. (1994)]. Then, monthly average atmospheric moisture deficit values were obtained for whole Turkey by using the best algorithm. Finally, monthly dropped average rainfall per surface was calculated for April via Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). The results of land surface temperature, atmospheric moisture deficit and rainfall were compared with the ground measurements. RMSE values and correlation coefficients were 2.187 oK and r=0.978 for land surface temperature, 3.373 mb and r=0.982 for atmospheric moisture deficit, 14.114 mm and r=0.819 for rainfall respectively. All these results show it is possible that land surface temperature, atmospheric moisture deficit and rainfall maps belonging wide areas can be obtained with the low error rates by using NOAA satellite images.