Thermal sharpening of VIIRS data

Thermal Sharpening (TS) is usually referred to techniques widely used in several Earth Observation applications in order to increase the spatial resolution of thermal images. Profiting from the particular design of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) sensor mounted on board of the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite, we propose here a new approach for obtaining synthetic thermal data with increased spatial resolution and spectral diversity. The method exploits classical Pansharpening algorithms, which are very popular in the field of Visible and Near-InfraRed (VNIR) image fusion, for combining the VIIRS thermal bands with partially overlapping spectral responses. We evaluate the effectiveness of several algorithms by performing a Reduced Resolution (RR) assessment on VIIRS real data, showing the importance of an adequate knowledge of the sensor characteristics.