Airborne Remote Sensing of Evapotranspiration over Rice Paddy

We present a retrieval scheme for the remote sensing of evapotranspiration (ET) over rice paddy. To perform the retrieval, high-resolution airborne imagery of multi-spectral visible and thermal infrared data, and ground-based meteorological measurements are utilized. Our ET retrieval scheme is based on the basic principal of surface energy budget, which is a result of balance in longwave and shortwave radiation, latent heat, sensible heat, and energy flux into the ground. To partition the latent and sensible heat fluxes of interest from the energy balance equation, three basic parameters are of most concern, including albedo, surface temperature, and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). The NDVI and albedo can be easily derived from the visible and near infrared spectral data, while the surface tem-perature can be determined through the analysis of the infrared data with the Stefan Boltzmann law. From the airborne imagery taken on 28 April 2003, we observe very good dry and wet pixels that can be easily corre-sponded to the radiation and evaporation controlled crite-ria, respectively, and, hence, for the further use in defin-ing the evaporative fraction needed to partition sensible and latent heat fluxes from the net energy flux. The de-rived ET is compared with the in situ measurements.