As an important component in the surface radiation budget, surface upwelling longwave radiation (SULR) is an outcome of the land surface energy exchange and mainly represents the capability of thermal radiation from the surface of the Earth. Existing satellite-derived SULR products are too coarse to support high-resolution numerical models, and their accuracy needs to be improved. In this study, an equivalent temperature is introduced through which a "split-window" atmospheric correction algorithm is developed for MODIS data to estimate the instantaneous clear-sky SULR. It is a simple and feasible method that is particularly applicable to MODIS data to acquire relatively high precision SULR under clear skies from which qualified water vapor contents (WVC) and thermal channel brightness temperatures are available. The root mean square errors (RMSEs) are less than 13 W/m2 for all WVC sub-ranges with the viewing zenith angle (VZA) less than 30°, or for all sub-ranges with the VZA less than 60° and the WVC less than 3.5 g/cm2. Also, applications and comparisons with the LST-emissivity method are made by using ground measurements which are collected from the network of surface radiation budget network data (SURFRAD) at the moment of MODIS overpass. Results show that the proposed model has high computational efficiency to estimate SULR from MODIS cloud-free data.