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Indian geostationary satellite Kalpana-1 (K1) offers a potential to capture the diurnal cycle of land surface temperature (LST) through thermal infrared channel (10.5–12.5μm) observations of the Very High Resolution Radiometer (VHRR) sensor. A study was carried out to retrieve LST by adapting a generalized single-channel (SC) algorithm (Jiménez-Muñoz and Sobrino, 2003) for the VHRR sensor over India. The basis of SC algorithm depends on the concept of Atmospheric Functions (AFs) that are dependent on transmissivity, upwelling and downwelling radiances of the atmosphere. In the present study AFs were computed for the VHRR sensor through the MODTRAN simulations based upon varying atmospheric and surface inputs. The AFs were fitted with the atmospheric columnar water vapour content and a set of coefficients was derived for LST retrieval. The K1-LST derived with the SC algorithm was validated with (a) in situ measurements at two sites located in western parts of India and (b) the MODIS LST products. Comparison of K1-LST with the in situ measurements demonstrated that SC algorithm was successful in capturing the prominent diurnal variations of 283–332K in the LST at desert and agriculture experimental sites with a rmse of 1.6K and 2.7K, respectively. Inter comparison of K1-LST and MODIS LST showed a reasonable agreement between these two retrievals up to LST of 300K, however a cold bias up to 7.9K was observed in MODIS LST for higher LST values (310–330K) over the hot desert region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]