High-Spatiotemporal-Resolution Remote Sensing Retrieval of Evapotranspiration with Sentinel-2 Data by Sharpening MODIS Land Surface Temperature

Abstract

High-spatiotemporal-resolution evapotranspiration (ET) is critical for precision irrigation management and water resource regulation. Regarding the existing spatiotemporal fusion methods suffering from sparse high-resolution observations and coarse land surface temperature (LST), this study took winter wheat in Luancheng District, Hebei Province, as the research object, and proposed a remote sensing ET retrieval method based on the LST sharpening model. The Data Mining Sharpener (DMS) algorithm combined with Sentinel-2 multispectral data was used to downscale MODIS LST from 1000 m to 10 m, with auxiliary variables (DEM, albedo, NDVI, land cover) integrated into the Cubist regression tree to improve the physical rationality and spatial details of MODIS LST. The 10 m resolution ET was estimated from 10 m sharpened LST and Sentinel-2 multispectral data using the surface energy balance model, and the unmixing–weight ET image fusion model (UWET) was adopted to fuse the 10 m resolution ET with MODIS low-resolution ET to generate a daily 10 m ET dataset covering the entire winter wheat growing season. Validation with eddy covariance flux measurements showed that the correlation coefficient R = 0.921, RMSE = 0.779 mm/day during 2019–2020, and R = 0.900, RMSE = 0.831 mm/day during 2020–2021. The results demonstrate that auxiliary variables significantly enhance the spatial reality of LST, LST sharpening effectively improves the spatial heterogeneity of ET, and Sentinel-2 data compensates for the temporal deficiency of Landsat, thereby greatly promoting the accuracy of spatiotemporal fusion. This method can provide reliable high-spatiotemporal-resolution data support for refined farmland irrigation management and water resources regulation.