VJ121C: Daily Global Land Surface Temperature and Emissivity at 0.05°

Twenty-five Science Datasets provide daily global land surface temperature, emissivity, and quality control metrics from the NOAA-20 VIIRS sensor. The data is a Level 3 Climate Modeling Grid product resampled to a 0.05-degree (5,600 m) resolution from native 750-meter observations. Its algorithm averages cloud-free observations to ensure continuity with the MODIS Terra and Aqua mission records.

Use Cases

• Monitoring urban heat island intensity based on daily land surface temperature grids.
• Validating climate model outputs using a long-term, MODIS-continuous temperature record.
• Analyzing surface energy fluxes by incorporating emissivity values for bands M14, M15, and M16.
• Assessing daily thermal anomalies for drought or wildfire risk applications using quality-controlled observations.

Strengths

• Contains 25 distinct Science Datasets (SDS) including day/night LST, emissivity, view angle, time, and quality control.
• Algorithm improvements in Version 2 include enhanced calibration, geolocation accuracy, and aerosol flag correction.
• Designed for continuity with the long-term MODIS Terra and Aqua Earth Observation System mission.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as row count, file size, and specific column names are not provided on any platform.
• The license is ambiguously listed as 'other-license-specified' without explicit terms.
• Relies on the 'MODIS/VIIRS Land Quality Assessment website' for complete known issue documentation, which is an external dependency.

Provenance

Source

NOAA-20 Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) sensor, processed by LPCLOUD.

Collection Method

Daily compilation from Level 2 Gridded (L2G) intermediate products, mapped to a sinusoidal MODIS grid and averaged from cloud-free observations.

Freshness

Last updated on 2026-04-09 according to nasa_earthdata and datagov.

Geography

Global coverage at 0.05-degree resolution.