Lacustrine paleotemperature reconstructions are important for characterizing past temperature and hydroclimate change, validating multi-proxy reconstructions, and evaluating global climate models. In particular, lake water temperature is often derived from geochemical proxies–including clumped isotopes (Δ₄₇), oxygen isotopes (δ¹⁸O), alkenone lipids (U^k’₃₇), and GDGT compounds (TEX₈₆). However, global climate models, constrained by resolution, computational demand, and cost, are designed to simulate large-scale processes, often at the expense of resolving lakes and simulating lake temperature. Consequently, this limitation complicates the comparison of climate model-simulated variables such as air temperature, with lake water temperature or with other proxy variables (e.g., pollen-derived air temperature), and necessitates use of a transfer function to relate lake temperature to air temperature. Previous work developed transfer functions to translate proxy-derived seasonal lake water temperature to mean annual air temperature using ground-based measurements from 88 lakes. In this study, we introduce new lake-to-air temperature transfer functions (for annual, spring-summer, spring, summer, and warmest month) that incorporate lake surface water temperature, and new variables including latitude and elevation, by analyzing climate reanalysis data and long-term satellite observations of surface temperatures for 1395 modern lakes via regression-based inverse modeling. With the use of multiple regression models and a dataset roughly 10 times larger, the error in predictions of mean annual air temperature is reduced by up to 48% compared to previous work. To demonstrate the impact of the new transfer functions, we reconstruct Pliocene-Pleistocene mean annual air temperature from Δ₄₇-derived lake temperatures and compare estimates to model simulations for the Last Glacial Maximum and mid-Piacenzian warm period. The new transfer functions, with reduced error, should enable more accurate paleotemperature reconstructions from proxy-derived lake water temperature and allow for more comprehensive assessments of climate model skill.