Fast Fourier Convolutional GAN for 30 m Clear-Sky Land Surface Temperature Gap-Free Reconstruction
Satellite-derived Land Surface Temperature (LST) provides spatially comprehensive data that ground stations cannot match. However, its utility is frequently limited by severe data gaps due to the presence of clouds. As LST is essential for understanding land-atmosphere interactions, numerous methods have been proposed to address this challenge. Yet, the development of a scalable and adaptable pipeline for generating gap-free LST datasets and reconstructing cloud-contaminated pixels remains challenging. Moreover, the reconstruction of extensive missing regions in fine-spatial-resolution observations is particularly difficult. To address this challenge, we propose a Multimodal Fast Fourier Convolutional GAN for reconstructing cloud-contaminated pixels in fine-resolution (30 m) Landsat imagery to generate gap-free clear-sky LST products. The method leverages Fast Fourier Convolution to enable a global receptive field across the image, and is guided by a stack of data consisting of satellite observations and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. Across all LST quantiles, the interquartile range of scene-averaged RMSE (computed over reconstructed pixels) is consistently between 0.8 K and 1.8 K. The proposed approach enables the recovery of extensive missing regions, including scenes with more than 70% cloud-induced gaps, while relying on auxiliary data that are readily available at a near-global scale.