Land Surface Temperature Day Night Difference - MODIS, derived from MxD11 LST, Australia and New Zealand coverage

Land Surface Temperature Day Night Difference - MODIS, derived from MxD11 LST, Australia and New Zealand coverage

Figure 1: LST day, night and difference images from NetCDF file for 1-Jan-2014 over Australia and New Zealand

Link to the data

Data licence and Access rights

Alternate title

Land Surface Temperature-Day/Night/Difference from MOD11A2 (8-days,1km) - covering Australia and NZ

Abstract or Summary

Land Surface Temperature (LST) is a key variable for monitoring climatological processes and surface energy interactions at regional to global scales (Li et al. 2013). The MODIS LST product enables the estimation of diurnal variation of LST, which is a crucial parameter for the assessment of solar insolation, surface characteristics and climate variability (Braganza et al. 2004, Duan et al. 2014).

This data product combines day and night time LST data layers and a third layer, day-night difference layer, into a single netCDF file. These datasets were quality filtered based on the Quality Control (QC) layers provided with the MODIS data. MODIS data were reprojected to geographic projection (WGS 84 datum) and provide spatial coverage of Australia and New Zealand. Spatial resolution is 1 km with a temporal resolution of 8-days. Data are available for the period from March 2000 to current. LST and LST differences are provided in Kelvin units of measurement. 

LST difference is calculated as LST difference = LST day – LST night.

This product is functionally equivalent to the LPDAAC MODIS mosaics product for MOD11A2.005, with the addition of the LST difference layer and the extended spatial extent to include New Zealand. There may be small pixel differences between the two products due to different machines or parameters used for the mosaicing and resampling.

Spatial and Temporal extents

Point of contact

Credit

This dataset was developed by the Remote Sensing Group at UTS. The original data were supplied by the Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LPDAAC), located at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science Center (EROS) http://lpdaac.usgs.gov.

Keywords

There are three main thesauri that AusCover recommends:

1. Global Change Master Directory (http://gcmd.nasa.gov)
2. Climate and Forecast (CF) convention standard names (http://cfconventions.org/standard-names.html).
3. Fields of Research codes (http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/0/6BB427AB9696C225CA2574180004463E?opendocument).

Data quality

LPDAAC are responsible for the actual data quality and provide quality channels as part of most products.  These channels are processed the same as the data channels.  The mosaicing, remapping and reformatting processes do not alter either the data or the quality fields.

Quality assessment of the LPDAAC MODIS products is undertaken by the MODIS Land Data Discipline Team, http://landweb.nascom.nasa.gov.

Data set specific link(s) for MxD11 products are:

• http://landweb.nascom.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/QA_WWW/getSummary.cgi?esdt=MOD11
• http://landweb.nascom.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/QA_WWW/getSummary.cgi?esdt=MYD11

Users should be aware that not all tiles for a particular mosaic necessarily become available from the LPDAAC on the same day.  It is therefore possible that the most recent mosaic for any given product will be updated over several days, each time containing progressively more actual data within the same (standard) geographic extent.

We have had some minor issues with file corruption that have been detected by users unable to un-gzip the mosaic files.  If you discover any such files, please report them to us (see contacts section).

Flags used for these datasets are as below:

Validation status

Quality assessment of the LPDAAC MODIS products is undertaken by the MODIS Land Data Discipline Team, http://landweb.nascom.nasa.gov.

Data set specific link(s) for MxD11 products are:

• http://landval.gsfc.nasa.gov/ProductStatus.php?ProductID=MOD11

Related products

References

Algorithm summary

The MOD11A2 data were downloaded from LPDAAC (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov) in HDF format and were quality filtered based on the flags provided in the Quality Control (QC) layers. Pixels with the following labels indicated in the QA bitmap layer were accepted:

• Mandatory QA: LST produced with good quality and other quality
• Emis Error Flag: Average emissivity error <=0.04
• LST Error Flag: Average LST error <=3K

QA filtered 8-day LST day and night data covering Australia and New Zealand (19 tiles per 8 days) were mosaicked and reprojected from the MODIS sinusoidal to WGS 84 geographic projection to obtain day and night layers in GeoTiff format. The LST difference layer was calculated as,

    LST difference = LST day – LST night

LST day, LST night and LST difference layers were stacked and converted to a single netCDF file for each 8-day period.

The LPDAAC product pages, https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/dataset_discovery/modis/modis_products_table/mod11a1 provide links to the ATBDs and other supporting documentation of the HDF datasets used to generate this product.

Detailed user guide and ATBD can be found as the attachment LST_UG_ATBD_Web_v1.pdf.

Product version history

Metadata history