Estimating basin-wide air temperature by partial integration of remote sensing data

A comparison of various methods that enable temporally continuous computation of basin-wide air temperature is presented. An approach that combines remote sensing data with measurements at meteorological stations for obtaining basin-wide air temperature is proposed and compared to the standard interpolation methods of point measurements. For a basin of over 1000 km(2), the proposed approach provides significantly more reliable air temperature rasters (average Delta = 9%) than the standard interpolation methods (average Delta = 25%), all by using satellite images and measurements from only two meteorological stations in comparison to standard methods using measurements from 10 meteorological stations.