Carefully calibrated global land surface temperature (Copernicus)
What it measures. The temperature of the land's surface skin across the globe at about 1 km resolution, where "skin" is the top of bare soil or vegetation as viewed from space, rather than the air above it.
How it's made. Produced from the SLSTR thermal imager on ESA Copernicus' Sentinel-3 satellites as a Level-2 product, but delivered later as a fully quality-checked "non-time-critical" version.
How & where you'd use it. Suited to research and long-term studies of climate, land use, and surface heat where accuracy matters more than speed.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2016-04-19 → ongoing
- Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
What you can do with it
- Map air pollutants — NO₂, aerosols, ozone
- Track greenhouse gases and Earth's energy budget
- Feed weather and air-quality analysis
Official description
This Collection provides Sentinel-3 SLSTR Level-2 Land Surface Temperature products containing data on land surface temperature measurements on a 1km grid. Radiance is measured in two channels to determine the temperature of the Earth's surface skin in the instrument field of view, where the term "skin" refers to the top surface of bare soil or the effective emitting temperature of vegetation canopies as viewed from above.
Get the data
# 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=["sentinel-3-sl-2-lst-ntc"], # 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.
Official links
- Open data source Copernicus STAC