Aerosol retrievals from multiple spaceborne sensors, including MODIS (on Terra and Aqua), MISR, OMI, POLDER, CALIOP, and SeaWiFS – altogether, a total of 11 different aerosol products – were comparatively analyzed using data collocated with ground-based aerosol observations from the Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) stations within the Multi-sensor Aerosol Products Sampling System (MAPSS, http:...

The land surface temperature (LST) is one of the most important parameters of surface-atmosphere interactions. Methods for retrieving LSTs from satellite remote sensing data are beneficial for modeling hydrological, ecological, agricultural and meteorological processes on Earth’s surface. Many split-window (SW) algorithms, which can be applied to satellite sensors with two adjacent thermal chan...

Passive microwave sensors onboard satellites, such as SSMI or AMSR-E, can penetrate clouds and can monitor the global sea ice distribution on daily basis. However, since the footprint size of passive microwave sensors are rather large, approx. 38x30kmfor SSM/I 37GHz and approx.8x14km for ASMR-E 37GHz, extraction of sea ice thickness with passive microwave sensors is not easy. In this study, we ...

We explore the potential of computing coastal ocean surface currents from ModerateResolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) satellite imagery using the maximum cross-correlation (MCC) method. To improve on past versions of this method, we evaluate combining MODIS and VIIRS thermal infrared (IR) and ocean color (OC) imagery to map the coas...

Multi-spectral data from the MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) onboard the Terra spacecraft are used to derive cloud optical thickness and effective particle radius using the algorithm of Nakajima and Nakajima (1995). Microphysical cloud properties are retrieved during strong aerosol events from biomass burning to better understand the actual effects of cloud-aerosol interac...

A prototype product suite, containing the Terra 8-day, Aqua 8-day, Terra–Aqua combined 8and 4-day products, was generated as part of testing for the next version (Collection 5) of the MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) leaf area index (LAI) products. These products were analyzed for consistency between Terra and Aqua retrievals over the following data subsets in North America...

Understanding the role of landscape heterogeneity and its influence on the scaling behavior of surface fluxes as observed by satellite sensors with different spatial resolutions is a critical need to investigate. In this study, the effects of pixel scales on ETc estimation and other parameters that are used to calculate ETc were investigated over different vegetation surfaces in south central N...

MODerate resolution Imaging Spectro-radiometer (MODIS), as part of NASA’s Earth Observe System (EOS) mission, is widely utilized in diversified scientific research areas. Both Terra and Aqua MODIS observe the earth in sun-synchronous orbit at three nadir spatial resolutions. MODIS has thirty-six bands that are located in four Focal Plane Assembles (FPAs) by wavelength: Visible (VIS), Near-Infra...

Although modern ocean color sensors, such as MODIS and SeaWiFS, are often considered global missions, in reality it takes many days, even months, to sample the ocean surface enough to provide complete global coverage. The irregular temporal sampling of ocean color sensors can produce biases in monthly and annual mean chlorophyll estimates. We quantified the biases due to sampling using data ass...