Daily Global Land Surface Temperature and Emissivity from MODIS Terra

MODIS/Terra satellite data provides daily global land surface temperature and three-band emissivity estimates on a 0.05-degree climate modeling grid. The MOD21 algorithm uses a physics-based Temperature/Emissivity Separation technique on thermal infrared bands to retrieve values simultaneously. This Collection 6.1 product is produced by the LPCLOUD organization from Level 2 intermediate data.

Use Cases

• Model urban heat island effects by analyzing LST variations across city and rural pixels.
• Monitor surface temperature anomalies for wildfire or volcanic activity detection using the three emissivity bands.
• Assimilate daily LST and view zenith angle data into numerical weather prediction models.
• Study desert surface energy dynamics, applying QC filtering to mitigate known high-temperature outliers.
• Calibrate land surface models by comparing retrieved emissivity values against ground-truth measurements.

Strengths

• Daily global coverage at a consistent 0.05-degree (approx. 5.6 km) resolution.
• Algorithm retrieves both LST and spectral emissivity simultaneously from three thermal infrared bands.
• Product includes seven Science Datasets: LST, QC flags, three emissivity bands, view zenith angle, and observation time.

Limitations

• Known issue of extreme high-temperature outliers, especially over desert regions like the Sahara, due to undetected cloud and dust.
• Users must apply Quality Control filtering to remove contaminated pixels, as bad values are retained in the output.
• Only observations with a cell coverage greater than 15% are considered for the daily average.

Provenance

Source

NASA Earthdata via LPCLOUD.

Collection Method

Derived from MODIS/Terra satellite Level 2 swath data, gridded and averaged onto a Climate Modeling Grid using the MOD21 TES algorithm.

Time Range

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Freshness

Daily update frequency.

Geography

Global coverage.