Earth Data School
About
Full catalog/modis-terra-mod11a2
modis-terra-mod11a2·dataset

Land surface temperature averaged over 8 days, 1 km (Terra)

MODIS Terra Land Surface Temperature Emissivity 8-Day L3 Global 1km
land ESA ESA Copernicus active
In plain English

What it measures. This averages the daily ground-surface temperatures over an 8-day window at 1-kilometer detail, for both daytime and nighttime, along with surface heat-emission (emissivity) values.

How it's made. Created by ESA Copernicus from NASA's MODIS sensor on Terra by averaging the daily temperature readings into an 8-day Level-3 composite.

How & where you'd use it. Smooths out daily noise and cloud gaps, making it useful for seasonal heat patterns, climate studies, and regional temperature comparisons.

What's measured

MODISTerraNASASatelliteGlobalLand Surface TemperatureLSTEmissivityThermal1kmMOD11A2

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2000-02-18 → ongoing
  • Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90

What you can do with it

  • Track deforestation, fire scars and land-cover change
  • Monitor crop and vegetation health (NDVI/EVI)
  • Map how built-up vs. green an area is over time
Official description

The MODIS Terra MOD11A2 Version 6.1 product provides an 8-day composite of per-pixel Land Surface Temperature and Emissivity (LST&E) at 1 km spatial resolution, distributed in a 1,200 × 1,200 km grid. Each pixel value represents the simple average of all corresponding MOD11A1 LST observations acquired during the 8-day compositing period. The product includes both daytime and nighttime surface temperature bands, along with associated quality control layers, observation times, view zenith angles, clear-sky coverage information, and emissivity estimates for MODIS Bands 31 and 32 derived from land cover types. The 8-day compositing interval corresponds to half of the exact ground track repeat cycle of the Terra and Aqua satellites.

Get the data

copernicus_access.py
# ESA Copernicus Data Space — open STAC API (free account)
from pystac_client import Client

cat = Client.open("https://stac.dataspace.copernicus.eu/v1")
search = cat.search(
    collections=["modis-terra-mod11a2"],   # add _cog or _nc for a format variant
    bbox=(-10, 35, 30, 60),             # your area (W,S,E,N)
    datetime="2024-01-01/2024-12-31",
)
items = list(search.items())            # then read assets with rioxarray / xarray
Browsing the Copernicus STAC is open; downloading bytes needs a free Copernicus Data Space account.