Infrared surveillance of crater lakes using satellite data

Abstract Under optimum circumstances, thermal infrared data recorded from satellites can measure water surface temperatures to accuracies of a few tenths of a degree Celsius. Such techniques are applied here to evaluate volcanic crater lake temperatures. At present, band 6 of the Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) is the most pertinent sensor in this respect, although its nominal 120 × 120 m “footprint” only permits useful measurements of circular lakes exceeding 340 m in diameter. In addition, the radiative properties of the atmosphere between sensor and target at the instant of observation should be well-characterised in order to make confident measurements of surface temperatures with single-band infrared data. An analysis is presented of three TM band-6 images of the crater lake at Poas volcano, Costa Rica, recorded on February 6, 1986, March 13, 1987, and May 10, 1988. In the February 1986 scene, the band-6-derived water surface temperature is 36°C which is 3°C less than a field measurement made in the same month. Since the satellite measurement was integrated over some 14,400 m 2 of the lake surface, while the field measurement was obtained at a single point below the surface, the former may be more representative of surface heat losses. Subsequent TM data reveal an increasing discrepancy between contemporaneous field and satellite observations, probably because the lake diameter had decreased to 250 m by March 1987, and to less than 200 m by mid-1988, greatly reducing the likelihood of obtaining a pure “lake” pixel. The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) which is earmarked for orbit on the first of NASA's Earth Observing System satellite platforms later this decade has five discrete spectral bands in the thermal infrared region and will produce data composed of 90 × 90 m pixels. These specifications could enable the determination of water surface temperatures of > 250 m diameter crater lakes by algorithms that implicitly account for atmospheric effects.