A Mechanism-Coupled Split Window Network for Medium- to High-Resolution Land Surface Temperature Retrieval

Abstract

Land surface temperature (LST) is a fundamental physical variable in land-atmosphere interactions, surface energy budgets, and climate processes. LST derived from medium- to high-resolution thermal infrared (TIR) observations effectively reveals thermal environmental disparities across distinct landscape units. However, achieving accurate, robust, and globally generalizable LST retrieval remains challenging under complex atmospheric conditions and diverse land cover types. Traditional split window (SW) algorithms heavily rely on empirical parameterizations, whose fixed coefficients fail to adapt to complex scenarios such as high surface temperatures and high atmospheric water vapor content. Concurrently, conventional data-driven models exhibit limited generalizability to out-of-distribution (OOD) samples due to the absence of explicit physical structure constraints. To address these issues, this study proposes a Parallel Component Decoupled Neural Network (PCD-Net) framework, which reformulates SW retrieval as a dynamic learning problem of physical component coefficients. Using the SW equation as the physical backbone, the framework constructs parallel subnetworks to adaptively learn the dynamic coefficients corresponding to the constant, first-order, and second-order brightness temperature difference terms; meanwhile, a residual branch is incorporated to supplement the nonlinear coupling corrections induced by the joint effects of surface emissivity and atmospheric water vapor. Through this component-level decoupled modeling, PCD-Net explicitly characterizes the dynamic response relationships between land surface emissivity, atmospheric water vapor content, and different SW physical components.