GeoAI in Temperature Correction for Rice Heat Stress Monitoring with Geostationary Meteorological Satellites

To address the challenge of obtaining high-spatiotemporal-resolution and high-precision temperature grids for agricultural meteorological monitoring, this research focuses on rice heat stress monitoring with the China Meteorological Administration Land Data Assimilation System (CLDAS) and develops a temperature correction model that synergizes physical mechanisms with a data-driven strategy by introducing a GeoAI framework. Ensemble learning methods (XGBoost, LightGBM, and Random Forest) were utilized to process a comprehensive set of predictors, integrating dynamic surface features derived from FY-4 satellite’s high-frequency observation data. The data comprised surface thermal regime metrics, specifically the daily maximum land surface temperature (LSTmax) and its diurnal range (LSTmax_min), along with vegetation indices including the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and enhanced vegetation index (EVI). Further, topographic attributes derived from a digital elevation model (DEM) were incorporated, such as slope, aspect, the terrain ruggedness index (TRI), and the topographic position index (TPI). The approach uniquely capitalized on the temporal resolution of geostationary data to capture the diurnal land surface dynamics crucial for bias correction. The proposed models not only enhanced temperature data quality but also achieved impressive accuracy. Across China, the root mean square error (RMSE) was reduced to 1.04 °C, mean absolute error (MAE) to 0.53 °C, and accuracy (ACC) to 0.97. Additionally, the most notable improvement was that the RMSE decreased by nearly 50% (from 2.17 °C to 1.11 °C), MAE dropped from 1.48 °C to 0.80 °C, and ACC increased from 0.72 to 0.96 in the southwestern region of China. The corrected rice heat stress data (2020–2023) indicated that significant negative correlations exist between yield loss and various heat stress metrics in the severely affected middle and lower Yangtze River region. The research confirms that embedding geostationary meteorological satellites within a GeoAI framework can effectively enhance the precision of agricultural weather monitoring and related impact assessments.