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

ECOSTRESS Tiled Land Surface Temperature and Emissivity Instantaneous Level 2 data provides atmospherically corrected land surface temperature and emissivity values derived from five thermal infrared bands. The data is collected globally between 52° N and 52° S latitudes by the ECOSTRESS instrument on the International Space Station, with a spatial resolution of 70 meters. This Version 2 product from NASA is provided in Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF format and contains seven layers including LST, LST error, emissivity, and quality flags.

Use Cases

• Modeling plant water use and drought stress based on land surface temperature measurements.
• Analyzing urban heat island effects using high-resolution thermal data over cities.
• Studying land surface energy balance and emissivity for climate models.
• Monitoring thermal anomalies and surface temperature changes over time.

Strengths

• Data is derived using a physics-based Temperature and Emissivity Separation (TES) algorithm.
• Product provides seven specific layers including LST, LST error, wideband emissivity, and quality flags.
• Spatial resolution is 70 meters, offering detailed thermal imagery.
• Data is provided in Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) format for efficient cloud access.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Data acquisition experienced gaps and anomalies in 2018-2020, and the instrument operated in 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 attached to the International Space Station, processed using a Temperature and Emissivity Separation algorithm.

Time Range

Data acquisition began after launch on June 29, 2018, with known operational gaps.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 03:01:03.421001; freshness should be verified.

Geography

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