GOES Land Surface Temperature

Land surface temperature, a key indicator of the Earth surface energy budget, is widely required in applications of hydrology, meteorology and climatology. It is of fundamental importance to the net radiation budget at the Earth's surface and for monitoring the state of crops and vegetation, as well as an important indicator of both the greenhouse effect and the energy flux between the atmosphere and earth surface. Land Surface Temperature (LST) from NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) has been available as secondary products from other GOES product systems. In this product system, GOES LST is produced for the first time as primary products for operational use by NCEP/EMC for weather forecast and data assimilation models.

GOES LST algorithms are based on a split-window technique that corrects for atmospheric absorption, and applies prescribed surface emissivity information. In addition, an atmospheric path length is applied to further correct for satellite view zenith angle effect. Coefficients of the LST algorithm, which were derived using the atmospheric radiative transfer model (RTM), are stratified for daytime and nighttime conditions, as well as for dry and moist atmospheres. The algorithm is then verified using a RTM simulation dataset, and evaluated using proxy dataset and ground measurements.

The GOES LST products are produced routinely every hour for GOES EAST and WEST extended Northern Hemisphere and every 3 hours for GOES EAST and WEST Full Disk.

GOES West Full Disk

GOES East Full Disk