Ecosystems use solar energy for self-organisation and cool themselves by exporting entropy to the atmosphere as heat. These energy transformations are achieved through evapotranspiration, with plants as 'heat valves'. In this study, the dissipative process is demonstrated at sites in the Czech Republic and Belgium, using landscape temperature data from thermovision and satellite images. While global warming is commonly attributed to atmospheric CO 2 , the research shows water vapour has a concentration two orders of magnitude higher than other greenhouse gases. It is critical that landscape management protects the hydrological cycle with its capacity for dissipation of incoming solar energy.
A spatially distributed land surface temperature is important for many studies. The recent launch of the Sentinel satellite programs paves the way for an abundance of opportunities for both large area and long-term investigations. However, the spatial resolution of Sentinel-3 thermal images is not suitable for monitoring small fragmented fields. Thermal sharpening is one of the primary methods used to obtain thermal images at finer spatial resolution at a daily revisit time. In the current study, the utility of the TsHARP method to sharpen the low resolution of Sentinel-3 thermal data was examined using Sentinel-2 visible-near infrared imagery. Compared to Landsat 8 fine thermal images, the sharpening resulted in mean absolute errors of ~1 °C, with errors increasing as the difference between the native and the target resolutions increases. Part of the error is attributed to the discrepancy between the thermal images acquired by the two platforms. Further research is due to test additional sites and conditions, and potentially additional sharpening methods, applied to the Sentinel platforms.
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