Daily Global Nighttime Land Surface Temperature and Emissivity from MODIS Aqua

MODIS/Aqua Land Surface Temperature/3-Band Emissivity Daily L3 Global 1km SIN Grid Night V061 provides daily global nighttime land surface temperature and emissivity data at 1km resolution. The dataset is produced by LPCLOUD/NASA using the MODIS Aqua sensor and a physics-based Temperature/Emissivity Separation algorithm. It contains seven Science Datasets including calculated LST, three emissivity bands, quality control flags, view zenith angle, and observation time.

Use Cases

• Analyze urban heat island intensity using the daily Land Surface Temperature (LST) values over metropolitan areas.
• Model surface energy fluxes by combining the three spectral emissivity bands with other meteorological data.
• Monitor thermal anomalies like wildfires or volcanic activity by detecting extreme high temperature outliers in the LST field.
• Assess retrieval stability under humid conditions using the dataset's improved Water Vapor Scaling atmospheric correction.
• Filter low-quality observations for analysis by applying the provided Quality Control (QC) flags and the 15% observation coverage threshold.

Strengths

• Global daily coverage at 1km spatial resolution in a sinusoidal grid.
• Simultaneous retrieval of both land surface temperature and three spectral emissivity bands.
• Algorithm employs an improved Water Vapor Scaling scheme for stability in warm, humid conditions.

Limitations

• Contains known high-temperature outliers, especially over desert regions like the Sahara, due to undetected cloud and dust.
• Users must manually apply Quality Control filtering to remove contaminated pixels, as outliers are not automatically removed.
• Product is derived from nighttime observations only, limiting diurnal analysis.

Provenance

Source

NASA LPCLOUD, derived from MODIS Aqua sensor data.

Collection Method

Produced from nighttime Level 2 Gridded (L2G) intermediate products using a Temperature/Emissivity Separation algorithm on MODIS bands 29, 31, and 32.

Time Range

Daily coverage from the MODIS Aqua mission operational period.

Freshness

Daily update frequency.

Geography

Global coverage on a sinusoidal grid.