ECOSTRESS: Global Land Surface Temperature and Emissivity at 70m Resolution

ECOSTRESS Gridded Land Surface Temperature and Emissivity Instantaneous L2 Global 70 m V002 provides atmospherically corrected land surface temperature and emissivity values derived from five thermal infrared bands. The data product, created by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has a spatial resolution of 70 meters and is collected globally between 52° N and 52° S latitudes. It contains 8 layers including LST, LST error, emissivity, and quality flags, packaged in HDF5 format.

Use Cases

• Modeling plant water stress and evapotranspiration based on land surface temperature measurements.
• Analyzing urban heat island effects using high-resolution thermal data.
• Monitoring drought conditions and vegetation health across global ecosystems.
• Calibrating and validating land surface models with instantaneous temperature and emissivity values.

Strengths

• High spatial resolution of 70 meters for detailed thermal analysis.
• Data is derived using a physics-based Temperature and Emissivity Separation (TES) algorithm.
• Contains 8 distinct data layers including quality flags and error estimates.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Data acquisition experienced gaps and anomalies, including a period of 3-band mode from May 2019 to April 2023.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Data collected by the ECOSTRESS instrument on the International Space Station and processed using a TES algorithm.

Time Range

Acquisitions began after launch on June 29, 2018, with ongoing collection.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 02:50:45.917945; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Global coverage between 52° N and 52° S latitudes.