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MODIS UCSB Emissivity Library

Data available
Emissivity measurements of natural and manmade materials that may be used as a source of spectral emissivities at the component level in the TIR BRDF models to calculate the scene emissivities. Samples of emissivity spectra are separated into four categories:
  • Water, ice, and snow
  • Soil and Minerals
  • Vegetation
  • Manmade materials
Developer
Dr. Zhengming Wan's MODIS LST Group at ICESS (Institute for Computational Earth System Science) located on the campus of UCSB (University of California, Santa Barbara).
Scientific documentation
The emissivity of flat materials is usually determined by measuring their reflectance with a TIR spectrometer combined with an integrating sphere and converting the reflectance to directional-hemispherical emissivity by the use of Kirchhoff's law.http://www.icess.ucsb.edu/modis/modis-lst_publications.html
Selected references
  • Z. Wan, D. Ng and J. Dozier (1994). Spectral emissivity measurements of land-surface materials and related radiative transfer simulations. Adv. Space Res., 14(3), pp.91-94.
  • W. Snyder, Z. Wan, Y. Zhang, and Y.-Z. Feng (1997). Thermal Infrared (3-14 microns) Bidirectional Reflection Measurements of Sands and Soils, Remote Sens. Environ., 60, 101-109.
How to access information
Data is freely available through ICESS at UCSB:
http://www.icess.ucsb.edu/modis/EMIS/html/em.html
Format information
Data in ASCII can be read with any text editor.
Date project began or when data was first available
March 1996 – June 1998
Confirmed users of database
For example,
K. Wang, Z. Wan, P. Wang, M. Sparrow, J. Liu, X. Zhou, and S. Haginoya, Estimation of surface long wave radiation and broadband emissivity using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) land surface temperature/emissivity products, J. Geophys. Res. - Atmos., 110, D11109 (2005).