Estimation of Land Surface Energy Fluxes from Remote Sensing Using One-Layer Modeling Approaches

The Earth’s climate changes both at regional and global scales. Inevitably, this also causes a change of the Earth’s water budget and its complex and dynamic energy balance with the Sun (Sorooshian et al. 2005). This is important for many regions around the globe, including the Asian Monsoon system over the Tibetan Plateau and northwest China. The Tibetan Plateau includes the world’s highest elevation with an average elevation of about 4000 m. The area represents an extensive mass extending from subtropical to middle latitudes. Because of the role of the Tibetan Plateau terrain, the land surface absorbs a large amount of solar radiation energy and shows significant seasonal changes of land surface heat and water fluxes (Yanai et al. 1992; Ye and Wu 1998; Ma et al. 2006). The study on the energy exchanges between the land surface and atmosphere has also been of paramount importance for the CAMP/Tibet and WATER (Ma et al. 2006; Li et al. 2009). Some interesting detailed studies including in situ observation analysis and remote sensing in this area have already been conducted (Ma et al. 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008b, 2011a,b,c; Ma 2003a,b; Tanaka et al. 2001; Yang et al. 2002, 2003; Gao et al. 2004; Oku and Ishikawa 2004; Li et al. 2006; Ma and Ma 2006; Oku and Ishikawa 2010).