MODIS/Terra MOD21A1N: Daily Global Land Surface Temperature at 1km Night

MODIS/Terra Land Surface Temperature/3-Band Emissivity Daily L3 Global 1km SIN Grid Night V061 is a NASA-produced dataset. It provides daily, global land surface temperature and emissivity estimates at a 1-kilometer resolution, derived from nighttime satellite observations using a physics-based TES algorithm. The dataset was last updated in March 2026.

Use Cases

• Monitoring global land surface temperature trends based on daily, 1km resolution data.
• Analyzing surface emissivity properties for different land cover types based on the three emissivity bands.
• Studying urban heat island effects using nighttime temperature observations.
• Validating climate and weather model outputs against satellite-derived land surface temperature.
• Detecting thermal anomalies like fires or volcanic activity, as the algorithm retains potentially hot pixels.

Strengths

• Data is produced daily, offering high temporal frequency for time-series analysis.
• Uses a physics-based Temperature/Emissivity Separation (TES) algorithm for simultaneous retrieval of LST and emissivity.
• Provides a global spatial coverage at a 1,000-meter resolution.
• Includes seven Science Datasets (SDS) such as quality control, emissivity bands, and observation time.

Limitations

• Known issue of extreme high temperature outliers, especially over desert regions, requiring user-applied Quality Control filtering.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and total file size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Produced daily from MODIS Terra satellite Level 2G swath data, averaged onto a sinusoidal grid.

Time Range

Daily coverage.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-12 23:41:25.737311; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Global.