Global hourly, 5 km, all-sky land surface temperature data from 2011 to 2021 based on integrating geostationary and polar-orbiting satellite data

Abstract

Abstract. Land surface temperature (LST) plays a dominant role in the surface energy budget (SEB) and hydrological cycling. Thermal infrared (TIR) remote sensing is the primary method of estimating LST globally. However, cloud cover leaves numerous data gaps in satellite LST products, which seriously restricts their applications. Efforts have been made to produce gap-free LST products from polar-orbiting satellites (e.g., Terra and Aqua); however, satellite data from limited overpasses are not suitable for characterizing the diurnal temperature cycle (DTC), which is directly related to heat waves, plant water stress, and soil moisture. Considering the high temporal variability in LST and the importance of the DTC, we refined the SEB-based cloudy-sky LST recovery method by improving its feasibility and efficiency and produced a global hourly, 5 km, all-sky land surface temperature (GHA-LST) dataset from 2011 to 2021. The GHA-LST product was generated using TIR LST products from geostationary and polar-orbiting satellite data from the Copernicus Global Land Service (CGLS) and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). Based on ground measurements at the 201 global sites from the Surface Radiation Budget (SURFRAD), Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN), Fluxnet, AmeriFlux, Heihe River basin (HRB), and Tibetan Plateau (TP) networks, the overall root-mean-square error (RMSE) of the hourly GHA-LST product was 3.31 K, with a bias of −0.57 K and R2 of 0.95. Thus, this product was more accurate than the clear-sky CGLS and MODIS MYD21C1 LST samples. The RMSE value of the daily mean LST was 1.76 K. Validation results at individual sites indicate that the GHA-LST dataset has relatively larger RMSEs for high-elevation regions, which can be attributed to high surface heterogeneity and input data uncertainty. Temporal and spatial analyses suggested that GHA-LST has satisfactory spatiotemporal continuity and reasonable variation and matches the reference data well at hourly and daily scales. Furthermore, the regional comparison of GHA-LST with other gap-free hourly datasets (ERA5 and Global Land Data Assimilation System, GLDAS) demonstrated that GHA-LST can provide more spatial texture information. The monthly anomaly analysis suggests that GHA-LST couples well with global surface air temperature datasets and other LST datasets at daily mean and minimum temperature scales, whereas the maximum temperature and diurnal temperature range of LST and air temperature (AT) have different anomalous magnitudes. The GHA-LST dataset is the first global gap-free LST dataset at an hourly, 5 km scale with high accuracy, and it can be used to estimate global evapotranspiration, monitor extreme weather, and advance meteorological forecasting models. GHA-LST is freely available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7487284 (Jia et al., 2022b) and http://glass.umd.edu/allsky_LST/GHA-LST (last access: 10 February 2023; Jia et al., 2022c).