An intercomparison of techniques to determine the area-averaged latent heat flux from individual in situ observations: a remote sensing approach using the European Field Experiment in a Desertification-Threatened Area data

Different procedures to obtain the area-averaged latent heat flux as a weighted average of ground-based observations of latent heat flux are described. Weighting coefficients are obtained from remote sensing data. A newly developed remote sensing algorithm, SEBAL, which solves the energy budget on a pixel-by-pixel basis, was successfully applied with EFEDA data. Two other methods for retrieving weighting coefficients were tested against SEBAL. The second method combines satellite images of surface temperature, surface albedo and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) into an index on a pixel-by-pixel basis. The third method uses a supervised classification.