MODIS/Aqua Land Surface Temperature/3-Band Emissivity Daily L3 Global 0.05Deg CMG V061

A new Collection 6.1 MODIS product uses a physics-based ASTER TES algorithm to retrieve both land surface temperature and spectral emissivity simultaneously from three thermal infrared bands. The MYD21C1 Version 6.1 dataset is produced daily from daytime observations, averaging cloud-free pixels with over 15% observation coverage. NASA produces this global dataset, which contains seven Science Datasets including LST, quality control, three emissivity bands, view zenith angle, and observation time.

Use Cases

• Monitoring global land surface temperature trends based on daily, physics-based retrievals.
• Analyzing surface emissivity for different land cover types based on the three spectral emissivity bands.
• Studying diurnal temperature cycles in desert regions, noting the described issue with high-temperature outliers.
• Improving atmospheric correction models using the integrated Water Vapor Scaling (WVS) scheme mentioned in the algorithm.
• Detecting thermal anomalies like fires or lava flows where the algorithm retains potentially extreme values.

Strengths

• Algorithm uses a physics-based Temperature/Emissivity Separation (TES) technique, differing from the heritage split-window products.
• Product is generated daily with a global spatial resolution of 0.05 degrees.
• Includes seven distinct Science Datasets (SDS) for comprehensive analysis.
• Incorporates an improved Water Vapor Scaling atmospheric correction for stability in warm, humid conditions.

Limitations

• Known to have increased occurrences of extreme high-temperature outliers, especially over desert regions, compared to heritage products.
• Users must apply Quality Control filtering themselves to remove contaminated pixels, as values are retained in the output.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Produced daily from MODIS/Aqua MYD21 Level 2 Gridded (L2G) intermediate products, averaged from cloud-free observations.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 00:23:05.865723; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Global