Enhanced pan-Arctic AVHRR land surface temperature dataset (1km spatial resolution)

This dataset comprises land surface temperature (LST) at 1 km spatial resolution for the circumpolar Arctic (> 50° North) based on AVHRR data for the 1981-2023 period (42 years). LST have been retrieved from the thermal infrared bands from the AVHRR sensors onboard of the NOAA and MetOp satellite series. Details about the LST processing procedure can be found in Dupuis et al. (2024). The enhanced version of the dataset has been produced by dowscaling the original pan-Arctic AVHRR lST dataset at GAC format (approx. 4km resolution) with deep anisotropic diffusion (Metzger al., 2023; Dupuis et al., 2025). The dataset has been filtered from clouds with the probabilistic cloud mask from the CLARA-A3 dataset (Karlsson et al., 2023, 10.5194/essd-15-4901-2023). The dataset has been validated against in situ data from the SURFRAD (https://gml.noaa.gov/grad/surfrad/overview.html), ARM (https://arm.gov/capabilities/observatories/nsa) and KIT (https://www.imk-asf.kit.edu/english/skl_stations.php) networks as well as a few Arctic stations from the BSRN network (https://bsrn.awi.de/).



Data & File Overview:

The dataset contains twice daily LST observations for each platform (day and night). Each file contains LST observations in the GAC format and in the enhanced resolution for the daytime or the nighttime overpass. Each file also contains information on the overpass time, satellite and sun zenith angles as well as R^2 and MAE values reflecting the performance of the radiative transfer modelling. 

Filename: Pan_Arctic_LST_avhrr_XXXXX_YYYYMM_DAY__***.nc, where XXXXX represents the satellite identifier, YYYYMM the monthly timestamp (YYYY=year, MM=month) and *** the timestamp of the file generation.

Satellite identifiers:
AVN07 : NOAA 7
AVN09 : NOAA 9
AVN11 : NOAA 11
AVN14 : NOAA 14
AVN16 : NOAA 16
AVN18 : NOAA 18
AVN19 : NOAA 19
AVMEA : MetOp-A
AVMEB : MetOp-B
AVMEC : MetOp-C

Data specific information:

The LST files are available as a gridded product in the WGS84 coordinate reference system and are distributed as NetCDF files. The dataset covers the pan-Arctic region (-180°, 90°, 180°, 50°).

Each *.nc file contains contains LST data either for the daytime or the nighttime overpass (labelled as _DAY or _NIGHT). The NetCDF data structure has 3 dimensions and 3 coordinates (time, lat, lon). The following variables are present in each file:

LST : LST data at 0.01° resolution
LST_GAC: LST data at 0.05° resolution
Sat_zen: satellite zenith angle
Sun_zen: sun zenith angle
Scanline_time: overpass time in fractional hours
r^2 : r^2 value from the radiative transfer modelling
MAE : MAE value from the radiative transfer modelling



Credit:

To use this data please cite this dataset and the respective journal publication:

Dupuis, S., Metzger, N., Schindler, K., Göttsche, F., & Wunderle S. (2025) 42 years of satellite-derived land surface temperature data for the pan-Arctic region. [Preprint]