Rhea's exosphere is thought to originate from sources of carbon, water ice and other volatiles that arrived at Rhea by bombardment. Its seasonal variability is directly driven by polar surface temperatures allowing surface adsorption, and the persistence of source volatiles require that seasonal temperatures remain sufficiently cold to retain them. Cassini CIRS detected temperatures in Rhea's winter polar region of 23 K, amongst the coldest measured in the Solar System, but with a relatively large footprint we seek to add value to these observations by modeling sub field-of-view (FOV) temperature distribution and examining how the coldest scenes evolve on a seasonal basis. A simple, rough surface 1-dimensional thermal model is developed using a digital elevation map as input to a thermal model. We compared averaged rough and flat modeled FOVs to CIRS temperatures for a set of case study observations in the south polar region in winter darkness and found they both agree within expected CIRS error in all cases. We develop an asymmetric estimate of CIRS FOV temperature uncertainty, which is particularly important for very cold spectra to accurately represent the sensitivity of the instrument. This approach provides a conservative upper temperature limit to spectral fits whilst highlighting there is often little information to constrain the lower bound of temperature uncertainty in these cases. The distribution of modeled sub-FOV facet temperatures is explored for the full range of azimuth angles and slope gradients. More extensive and cooler temperatures were found in the rough model, complemented by fewer but warmer areas than the flat model. We find temperature contrasts of individual model facets of up to 15 K warmer and 11 K colder within some CIRS FOV when the rough model was compared flat, in a case study of scenes in winter darkness. This is due to the persistence of the seasonal thermal wave beneath the surface. We tested model sensitivity to thermal input parameters (thermal inertia and bolometric Bond albedo). These values are challenging to constrain due to limited observations and measurement noise and are expected to vary with subtle changes in surface characteristics. We found that within 20° of the pole, temperatures do not rise significantly above 80 K all year, implying that a variety of simple organic molecules, linear amides and other carbon-containing compounds would remain stable on a quasi-permanent basis, potentially until photolytic or radiolytic mechanisms liberate by-products which provide a source for exospheric constituents. The simple rough model indicates that some facets experience very different summer/winter season lengths than a flat model can represent, which is important in terms of the exospheric sequestration process. We use threshold temperatures of 55 K for CO2 and 30 K for O2 ice as proxies for their relative stability at the surface. The surface coverage of these temperatures with time was compared to modeled exospheric abundance by Teolis and Waite (2016). They are anti-correlated which is expected, but with slight differences in timings of minima and the equinoctial maxima. We find that the rough model suggests larger areas able to adsorb these species than the flat model, and that the cumulative influence of topography would have a direct relationship on the timing and abundance of the exosphere. We place Rhea's polar environment in context with other icy moons in the Saturnian system using the flat model. The satellites Tethys, Dione and Enceladus experience similar polar thermal regimes to Rhea (with exceptionally cold winters) and would potentially benefit from the consideration of topography in relation to exospheric modeling. •We characterize new asymmetrical temperature errors for the coldest CIRS measurements (< 30 K).•Rhea’s polar regions remain < 80 K, preserving many volatile species that could interact with the seasonal exosphere.•Several of Saturn’s icy satellites are as cold as Rhea.