Cross-satellite comparison of operational land surface temperature products derived from MODIS and ASTER data over bare soil surfaces

The collection 6 (C6) MODIS land surface temperature (LST) product is publicly available for the user community. Compared to the collection 5 (C5) MODIS LST product, the C6 MODIS LST product has been refined over bare soil pixels. Assessing the accuracy of the C6 MODIS LST product will help to facilitate the use of the LST product in various applications. In this study, we present a cross-satellite comparison to evaluate the accuracy of the C6 MODIS LST product (MOD11_L2) over bare soil surfaces under various atmospheric and surface conditions using the ASTER LST product as a reference. For comparison, the C5 MODIS LST product was also used in the analysis. The absolute biases (0.2-1.5 K) of the differences between the C6 MODIS LST and ASTER LST over bare soil surfaces are approximately two times less than those (0.6-3.8 K) of the differences between the C5 MODIS LST and ASTER LST. Furthermore, the RMSEs (0.7-2.3 K) over bare soil surfaces for the C6 MODIS LST are significantly smaller than those (0.9-4.2 K) for the C5 MODIS LST. These results indicate that the accuracy of the C6 MODIS LST product is much better than that of the C5 MODIS LST product. We recommend that the user community employs the C6 MODIS LST product in their applications.