MOD21A1D: Daily Global Land Surface Temperature and Emissivity

Daily global land surface temperature and emissivity data at 1km resolution from NASA's MODIS Terra satellite. The dataset uses a physics-based Temperature/Emissivity Separation algorithm on MODIS thermal bands 29, 31, and 32, combined with an improved atmospheric correction scheme. It 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 1km resolution thermal data
• Analyzing spectral emissivity patterns based on the three emissivity bands provided
• Studying atmospheric correction impacts on temperature retrieval based on the Water Vapor Scaling scheme
• Filtering contaminated pixels for quality analysis based on the quality control datasets
• Comparing TES algorithm performance against split-window techniques based on the MOD21 vs MOD11 methodology

Strengths

• Spatial resolution of 1,000 meters for detailed global coverage
• Algorithm uses three MODIS thermal infrared bands (29, 31, 32) for simultaneous LST and emissivity retrieval
• Includes seven distinct Science Datasets for comprehensive analysis

Limitations

• Known issue of extreme high temperature outliers, especially over desert regions like the Sahara
• Contaminated pixels are retained in output; users must apply Quality Control filtering
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Produced daily from daytime Level 2 Gridded intermediate LST products mapped onto a sinusoidal MODIS grid.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 00:16:18.758792

Geography

Global