The MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) is one of the key instruments for the NASA s Earth Observing System (EOS). The MODIS ProtoFlight Model (PFM) was launched on-board the EOS Terra spacecraft on December 18, 1999 and has been providing the science community and public users global data sets for the study of the land, oceans, and atmosphere for more than two and a half year...

The potential of Landsat data processing to provide systematic continental scale products has been demonstrated by several projects including the NASA Webenabled Landsat Data (WELD) project. The recent free availability of Landsat data increases the need for robust and efficient atmospheric correction algorithms. This study compares the accuracy of two Landsat atmospheric correction methods: a ...

This paper examines the use of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) observed active fire data (pixel counts) to refine the National Emissions Inventory (NEI) fire emission estimates for major wildfire events. This study was motivated by the extremely limited information available for many years of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) NEI about the specific...

Photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) is a key input parameter for almost all terrestrial ecosystem models, but the spatial resolution of current PAR products is too coarse to satisfy regional application requirements. In this paper, we present an operational system for PAR retrieval from MODIS data that is based on an idea proposed by [Liang, S., Zheng, T., Liu, R., Fang, H., Tsay, S. -C.,...

Accurately estimating vegetation productivity is important in research on terrestrial ecosystems, carbon cycles and climate change. Eight-day gross primary production (GPP) and annual net primary production (NPP) are contained in MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) products (MOD17), which are considered the first operational datasets for monitoring global vegetation productivi...

Using streamflow and Snowpack Telemetry (SNOTEL) measurements as constraints, the evaluation of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) daily and 8-day snow-cover products is carried out using the Upper Rio Grande River Basin as a test site. A time series of the snow areal extent (SAE) of the Upper Rio Grande Basin is retrieved from the MODIS tile h09v05 covering the time peri...

The Earth Observing System [1] initiated high quality global Earth observations and operational aerosol retrievals over land. With the wide swath (2300 km) of MODIS instrument, the MODIS Dark Target algorithm [2-3] currently complemented with the Deep Blue method [4] provides daily global view of planetary atmospheric aerosol. With MODIS aerosol program being very successful, there are still se...

Leaf area index collected in a needle-leaf forest site near Ruokolahti, Finland, during a field campaign in June 14-21, 2000, was used to validate Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) LAI and FPAR algorithm. The field LAI data was first related to 30m resolution Enhanced Thermal Mapper Plus (ETM+) images using empirical methods to create a high resolution LAI map. It shows that...

This work modelled the spatial distribution of the rodent species that act as hosts in the transmission cycle of the parasitic tapeworm Echinococcus multilocularis. The rodent distribution was modelled in relation to landscape characteristics in four ways, using (1) a Landsat ETM+ derived hard classification, (2) single-image Landsat ETM+ derived NDVI, (3) single-image MODIS 16-day composite ND...

Operational monitoring of global terrestrial gross primary production (GPP) and net primary production (NPP) is now underway using imagery from the satellite-borne Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor. Evaluation of MODIS GPP and NPP products will require site-level studies across a range of biomes, with close attention to numerous scaling issues that must be addressed t...