The Terra Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) Global Emissivity Dataset (GED) is a collection of monthly files (see known issues for gaps) for each year of global emissivity. The ASTER GED data products are generated for 2000 through 2015 using the ASTER Temperature Emissivity Separation (TES) algorithm atmospheric correction method. This algorithm method uses Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Atmospheric Profiles product MOD07 and the MODerate spectral resolution TRANsmittance (MODTRAN) 5.2 radiative transfer model along with the snow cover data from the standard monthly MODIS/Terra snow cover monthly global 0.05 degree product MOD10CM, and vegetation information from the MODIS monthly gridded NDVI product MOD13C2. ASTER GED Monthly V041 data products are offered in Hierarchical Data Format 5 (HDF5).

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology, developed the ASTER GED product.

Known Issues

• Since ASTER GED Monthly V041 uses MOD10CM as an input, there will be some months that were unable to be created due to missing data. Please see the MODIS/Terra Data Outages Webpage for more information.

Improvements/Changes from Previous Versions

• The removal of the extraneous snow layer.
• The optimized rows and columns for the data layers.
• The updated SDS Attributes in the metadata for bounding coordinates.
• The previous ASTER GED V004 product incorporated an emissivity adjustment to the V003 product. See “The ASTER Global Emissivity Dataset (ASTER GED): Mapping Earth’s emissivity at 100 meter spatial scale” publication Section 4 for more information.