Developing a temporally land cover-based look-up table (TL-LUT) method for estimating land surface temperature based on AMSR-E data over the Chinese landmass.

•A temporally land cover-based look-up table (TL-LUT) method for calculating land surface temperatures from the AMSR-E data is proposed.•The TL-LUT method has a better performance than the commonly used single channel method.•The TL-LUT method is used to generate the daily surface temperature maps of the Chinese landmass.