Integrated Climate Data Center

MODIS Land Surface Albedo

Land Surface Albedo for March 31 - April 15, 2010. Note the high albedo over the deserts and over snow, and the lower albedo over, e.g., forest areas.

Access

UNRESTRICTED

This data set is only available for a restricted user group, please contact us if you want to access these data.

RESTRICTED only accessable in ZMAW net or via CliSAP login  What does that mean?

View data via LAS

Data access via OPeNDAP

Data access via file system: /data/icdc/land/modis_albedo

 

Description

This data set comprises 8-daily values of the gridded global land surface albedo derived from MODIS reflectance values observed at bands 1-7 for periods of 16 days; successive 16-day periods overlap by 8 days. Depending on the availability data from EOS-AQUA and/or EOS-TERRA are used.

We are offering the data set with a spatial resolution of 0.05° (about 5600 m). The data set is also available with 1000 m and 500 m spatial resolution (see LPDAAC Website (seach for albedo)).

This is data set version 005.

We recommend the EOS-Data hand book for further reading.

 

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Parameters

Name Unit
bihemispheric broadband shortwave (0.3 … 4.0µm) surface albedo (white sky albedo) --
bihemispheric broadband shortwave surface albedo (white sky albedo) --
bihemispheric broadband near-infrared surface albedo (white sky albedo) --
bihemispheric broadband shortwave (0.3 … 4.0µm) surface albedo (black sky albedo) --
bihemispheric broadband shortwave surface albedo (black sky albedo) --
bihemispheric broadband near-infrared surface albedo (black sky albedo) --
snow cover % (0...100)
Quality flag --
Relative number of data used for analysis % (0...100)

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Coverage, spatial and temporal resolution

Period and temporal resolution:

  • February 2000 until December 2012
  • 8-daily 16-day-composite

Coverage and spatial resolution:

  • Global
  • Spatial resolution: 0.05° x 0.05° (about 5600 m, Climate Modeling Grid)
  • Geographical longitude: 179.975°W to 179.975°E
  • Geographical latitude: 89.975°S to 89.975°N
  • Dimension: 3600 rows x 7200 columns
  • Altitude: Following topography

Format:

  • NetCDF

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Data quality

The data offered here are in netCDF format. These include, in addition to the white sky albedo (reflection of diffuse radiation) its difference to the black sky albedo (reflection of direct radiation), quality flags which give information about the quality of the inversion, and the percentage number of high-resolution data per grid cell that were used for this product.

Original data are available in HDF-EOS Format. These data include in addition the reflectance values for each channel, the white & black sky albedo calculated separately for the visible and near infrared part of the spectrum, the solar zenith angle, and the percentage snow cover.

For more information:

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Contact

LP DAAC User Services

U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)

Center for Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS)

email: LPDAAC@we dont want spameos.nasa.gov

 

Alexander Löw

Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg

E-Mail: alexander.loew@we dont want spamzmaw.de

 

Stefan Kern

ICDC, CliSAP, Universität Hamburg

email: stefan.kern@we dont want spamzmaw.de

 

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Data citation

How to cite when using the data:

These data are distributed by the Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC), located at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center (lpdaac.usgs.gov), distributed in netCDF format by the Integrated Climate Data Center (ICDC, http://icdc.zmaw.de) University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany.

 
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