Scaling Remotely Sensed Surface Temperatures of Forests and Melting Snow

In heterogeneous mountain and forest terrain, where in situ measurements of seasonal snow are sparse, thermal infrared (TIR) remote sensing from aerial or spaceborne platforms can give us spatially distributed measurements of surface temperatures. However, even very high resolution remote sensing data provides us with the surface temperatures of mixed pixels, where features of interest such as forest canopy and the snow surface are blurred together. Understanding the role that TIR image scale and resolution play in how surface temperatures are represented in remote sensing observations can help improve how these data are collected and applied to snow hydrology and mountain ecology research.