VJ121A1N: Daily Global Land Surface Temperature and Emissivity at Night

NOAA-20 VIIRS Land Surface Temperature and Emissivity Night Version 2 product provides daily, global 1-kilometer gridded data. The dataset contains seven science variables, including land surface temperature, quality control, emissivity for three spectral bands, view zenith angle, and observation time. It is algorithmically compatible with MODIS products to ensure continuity of Earth observation records.

Use Cases

• Monitoring urban heat island effects using nighttime land surface temperature (LST) values.
• Analyzing surface emissivity for bands M14, M15, and M16 to improve atmospheric correction models.
• Tracking temporal changes in land surface properties via daily, gridded time-series observations.
• Validating and calibrating climate models with a MODIS-compatible, satellite-derived temperature product.

Strengths

• Provides daily global coverage, enabling high-frequency temporal analysis.
• Algorithm is synergistically developed with MODIS LST&E Version 6.1, promoting data continuity.
• Includes a quality control (QC) Science Dataset to filter observations.
• Data is processed from multiple overlapping observations, with a 15% observation coverage threshold for averaging.

Limitations

• Metadata for row count, file size, and specific column names is unavailable across all sources.
• Dataset is limited to nighttime observations only.
• Spatial resolution is 1 km, which is resampled from the sensor's native 750-meter resolution.

Provenance

Source

NOAA-20 Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) satellite.

Collection Method

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

Time Range

Daily, starting from the NOAA-20 satellite's operational period (specific start date not provided).

Freshness

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

Geography

Global coverage on a 1km sinusoidal grid.