The land surface temperature (LST) CCI project, which is funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) as part of the Agency’s Climate Change Initiative (CCI) Programme, aims to deliver a significant improvement on the capability of current satellite LST data records to meet the challenging Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) requirements for climate applications to realise the full potential of long-term LST data for climate science.

Accurate knowledge of LST plays a key role in describing the physics of land-surface processes at regional and global scales as they combine information on both the surface-atmosphere interactions and energy fluxes within the Earth Climate System. LST provides a metric of surface state when combined with vegetation parameters and soil moisture and is one of the drivers of vegetation phenology. Furthermore, LST is an independent temperature data set for quantifying climate change complementary to the near-surface air temperature ECV based on in situ measurements and reanalyses.

The team uses data from a variety of satellites to provide an accurate view of temperatures across land surfaces globally over the past +20 years. This involves developing innovative techniques to merge data from different satellites into combined long-term satellite records for climate. These will all be evaluated by scientists working at leading climate centres.