Retrieval of Lake Bulk and Skin Temperatures Using Along-Track Scanning Radiometer (ATSR-2) Data: A Case Study Using Lake Tahoe, California

In 1999, four monitoring stations were permanently moored on Lake Tahoe, California-Nevada which provides near-real-time measurements of the surface skin temperature and bulk temperature on a near-continuous basis. The standard errors for recovering the daytime bulk and nighttime bulk temperature, by regressing the in situ measurements against the average ATSR-2 nadir 11- and 12-um channel brightness temperatures, are 0.40[degrees] and 0.18[degrees]C, respectively. A comparison between the measured skin temperatures, skin temperature recovered by an ATSR-2 two-channel sea surface temperature algorithm, and the in situ regression indicates that the ATSR-2 algorithm has a similar scatter to the in situ linear regression but is offset with respect to the measured skin temperatures.