Thermal‐infrared remote sensing and Kirchhoff's law: 1. Laboratory measurements

TLDR

The forthcoming Earth Observing System will supply global thermal‑infrared multispectral imagery, creating a need to understand how terrestrial surface materials emit and reflect infrared radiation, yet the influence of field environments on Kirchhoffian behavior remains unexplored, especially for low‑density materials such as snow, frost, and playa salts. The study aims to determine whether terrestrial surface materials obey Kirchhoff's law (ε = 1 − R) under laboratory and field conditions, particularly when a sample exhibits a thermal gradient. Directional hemispherical reflectance and directional emittance measurements were performed on rock and soil samples in a laboratory setting, heating them from below to create thermal gradients while radiating to a colder background. Only a very low‑density, fine‑particle sample with a steep thermal gradient showed a 6 % deviation from Kirchhoff's law; normal soils and rocks, even with semitransparent coatings, exhibited no detectable effect, indicating that emittance and reflectance measurements can reliably compute emissivity for most terrestrial materials.

Abstract

By the end of this century the Earth Observing System will provide worldwide, thermal infrared, multispectral images of the Earth, presenting geologists with a new kind of remote sensing data for interpretation. Thus it has become essential to understand the spectral emittance behavior of terrestrial surface materials. Perhaps the most fundamental question to be answered is the extent to which such materials follow Kirchhoff's law (ε = 1 − R ) under laboratory and field conditions, especially when a sample displays a thermal gradient. We present the first rigorous quantitative comparison of directional hemispherical reflectance and directional emittance measurements of rock and soil samples in the laboratory, with thermal gradients induced by heating them from below and allowing them to radiate to a colder background. The results show that only an extremely low density sample composed of fine particles sifted into a “fairy castle” structure displays a thermal gradient steep enough within the infrared skin depth to cause significant (6%) departure from Kirchhoff's law. There is no detectable effect on the more normal terrestrial samples, such as soils and rocks measured in the laboratory, even when semitransparent coatings are involved. Thus both emittance and reflectance measurements can be used to calculate sample emissivity for most terrestrial surface materials. However, the effect on Kirchhoffian behavior of different field environments, which may induce a steeper thermal gradient in particulate samples, has yet to be determined, and some low‐density surface materials like newly fallen snow, frost, and efflorescent salts on playas have yet to be measured in emittance.