An algorithm have been presented to retrieve land surface temperature from satellite radiative measurements, without requiring the channel land surface emissivities to be given previously. And by taking different errors in atmospheric temperature and moisture profiles into consideration in retrieval tests of land surface temperature, the atmospheric effect has been investigated, in order to see the possibility for the practical application of the retrieval algorithm. The results show that when the errors in atmospheric temperature and moisture are reasonable as usually could be obtained from radiosonde or satellite retrieval, the land surface temperatures might be determined with acceptable accuracies and the root mean square errors are less than 1K in most cases considered.