Evaluation of the global MODIS 30 arc-second spatially and temporally complete snow-free land surface albedo and reflectance anisotropy dataset

Land surface albedo is an essential variable for surface energy and climate modeling as it describes the proportion of incident solar radiant flux that is reflected from the Earth’s surface. To capture the temporal variability and spatial heterogeneity of the land surface, satellite remote sensing must be used to monitor albedo accurately at a global scale. However, large data gaps caused by cloud or ephemeral snow have slowed the adoption of satellite albedo products by the climate modeling community. To address the needs of this community, we used a number of temporal and spatial gap-filling strategies to improve ODIS RDF lbedo BAR ap-filling the spatial and temporal coverage of the global land surface MODIS BRDF, albedo and NBAR products. A rigorous evaluation of the gap-filled values shows good agreement with original high quality data (RMSE = 0.027 for the NIR band albedo, 0.020 for the red band albedo). This global snow-free and cloudfree MODIS BRDF and albedo dataset (established from 2001 to 2015) offers unique opportunities to monitor and assess the impact of the changes on the Earth’s land surface. © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC