ASTER Global Emissivity and Land Surface Temperature Dataset

The ASTER Global Emissivity Dataset (AG100) provides 100-meter resolution global maps of land surface temperature and emissivity. It was generated by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory using the ASTER TES algorithm with MODIS atmospheric correction on clear-sky pixels from Terra ASTER satellite scenes. The dataset covers the entire globe and is derived from observations acquired between 2000 and 2008.

Use Cases

• Analyzing global land surface energy budgets using temperature and emissivity data.
• Improving atmospheric correction models for other satellite sensors with the provided emissivity climatology.
• Studying surface material properties and thermal inertia for geological mapping.
• Validating and calibrating lower-resolution land surface temperature products from sensors like MODIS.

Strengths

• Provides global coverage at a high 100-meter spatial resolution.
• Derived from a consistent methodology (ASTER TES algorithm with WVS correction) applied to all clear-sky ASTER scenes from 2000-2008.
• Includes a mean climatology product aggregating data across the entire temporal extent.

Limitations

• The core dataset is temporally limited to observations from 2000 through 2008.
• Conflicting metadata exists: one source lists a last update of 2026-03 -13 (likely a metadata error), while another indicates the data generation ended in 2008.
• The specific file format for the primary dataset (HDF5) differs from the listed shared formats (BIN, ISO, PDF) for the decommissioned version.

Provenance

Source

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology.

Collection Method

Generated using the ASTER Temperature Emissivity Separation (TES) algorithm with Water Vapor Scaling (WVS) atmospheric correction, utilizing MODIS MOD07 profiles and MODTRAN 5.2.

Time Range

2000 through 2008

Freshness

2008-12-31 00:00:00

Geography

Global