Heat transfers into and out of near surface layers because of external heating by the thermal processes of conduction, convection, and radiation. A primary objective of temperature measurements and related thermal responses is to infer something about the nature of the composition and other physical attributes of materials at the Earth's surface and, in its atmosphere. For any material, certain internal properties play important roles in governing the temperature of a body at equilibrium with its surroundings. It denotes the capacity of a material to store heat, and we give it cgs units of calories per cubic cm. This property associates Heat Capacity to the thermal energy required to raise a mass of one gram of water by one degree Centigrade.
P is a measure of the heat transfer rate across a boundary between two materials.
Calculate the Thermal Inertia P for each type. List, in your opinion, the five most important of these. Some factors have fixed or constant effects, while others vary with each sensor overpass. We may possibly correct for the influence of some of the variable factors, but this is difficult to do routinely. Measurements made at isolated individual points in a scene and extrapolated to the general scene have limited validity.