CONTRIBUTION OF MODIS SATELLITE IMAGE TO ESTIMATE THE DAILY AIR TEMPERATURE IN THE CASABLANCA CITY, MOROCCO

Abstract. Air temperature is considered to be an essential variable for the study and analysis of meteorological regimes and chronics. However, the implementation of a daily monitoring of this variable is very difficult to achieve. It requires sufficient of measurements stations density, meteorological parks and favourable logistics. The present work aims to establish relationship between day and night land surface temperatures from MODIS data and the daily measurements of air temperature acquired between [2011-20112] and provided by the Department of National Meteorology [DMN] of Casablanca, Morocco. The results of the statistical analysis show significant interdependence during night observations with correlation coefficient of R²=0.921 and Root Mean Square Error RMSE=1.503 for T_min while the physical magnitude estimated from daytime MODIS observation shows a relatively coarse error with R²=0.775 and RMSE=2.037 for T_max. A method based on Gaussian process regression was applied to compute the spatial distribution of air temperature from MODIS throughout the city of Casablanca.