Surface Shortwave Net Radiation Estimation from Landsat TM/ETM plus Data Using Four Machine Learning Algorithms

Surface shortwave net radiation (SSNR) flux is essential for the determination of the radiation energy balance between the atmosphere and the Earth's surface. The satellite-derived intermediate SSNR data are strongly needed to bridge the gap between existing coarse-resolution SSNR products and point-based measurements. In this study, four different machine learning (ML) algorithms were tested to estimate the SSNR from the Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM)/Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) top-of-atmosphere (TOA) reflectance and other ancillary information (i.e., clearness index, water vapor) at instantaneous and daily scales under all sky conditions. The four ML algorithms include the multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS), backpropagation neural network (BPNN), support vector regression (SVR), and gradient boosting regression tree (GBRT). Collected in-situ measurements were used to train the global model (using all data) and the conditional models (in which all data were divided into subsets and the models were fitted separately). The validation results indicated that the GBRT-based global model (GGM) performs the best at both the instantaneous and daily scales. For example, the GGM based on the TM data yielded a coefficient of determination value (R-2) of 0.88 and 0.94, an average root mean square error (RMSE) of 73.23 W.m(-2) (15.09%) and 18.76 W.m(-2) (11.2%), and a bias of 0.64 W.m(-2) and -1.74 W.m(-2) for instantaneous and daily SSNR, respectively. Compared to the Global LAnd Surface Satellite (GLASS) daily SSNR product, the daily TM-SSNR showed a very similar spatial distribution but with more details. Further analysis also demonstrated the robustness of the GGM for various land cover types, elevation, general atmospheric conditions, and seasons