GloSVeT: a global 0.05° monthly mean surface soil and vegetation component temperature dataset (2003–2023)

Abstract

Current satellite-derived land surface temperature (LST) products represent a mixed radiative signal that integrates soil and vegetation contributions, obscuring the physical mechanisms controlling surface energy partitioning and ecosystem functioning. To overcome this limitation, this study developed the Global Soil and Vegetation Temperature dataset (GloSVeT), the first global product that simultaneously provides surface soil and vegetation component temperatures at 0.05° spatial resolution for the period 2003–2023. GloSVeT was generated using the multisource data fusion-based global surface soil and vegetation temperature retrieval (FuSVeT) method, which integrates multi-temporal MODIS observations with ERA5-Land reanalysis to improve spatial completeness, retrieval accuracy, and computational efficiency. Its performance was extensively assessed through a comprehensive evaluation framework combining internal closure check, flux-tower validation at 72 representative sites, triple collocation (TC) analysis, and physical consistency assessments. Results show that GloSVeT largely preserves the original MODIS mixed-pixel LST constraint, and achieves reliable accuracy with coefficients of determination mostly at or above 0.9 and root mean square errors generally around 2 K for both components. TC analysis further demonstrates globally consistent performance, with advantages in humid tropics and transitional ecosystems compared with reanalysis products. In addition, soil temperature anomalies are predominantly negatively correlated with soil moisture whereas vegetation temperature aligns with solar-induced fluorescence along a clear gradient from energy-limited to water-limited biomes, indicating the physical consistency of GloSVeT. Over pixels where soil and vegetation temperatures are simultaneously available, both components exhibit evident warming trends during 2003–2023, with rates of 0.44 ± 0.04 K per decade for soil temperature and 0.39 ± 0.04 K per decade for vegetation temperature. In summary, GloSVeT provides a physically consistent, observation-driven depiction of surface thermal dynamics, offering new opportunities for quantifying land–atmosphere energy exchange, monitoring ecosystem hydrothermal responses, and improving the representation of land surface processes in Earth system models. GloSVeT is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.11888/RemoteSen.tpdc.303317 (Liu and Li, 2026a) and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22724289 (Liu and Li, 2026b).