Satellite-based remote sensing of active fires is the only practical way to consistently and continuously monitor diurnal fluctuations in biomass burning from regional, to continental, to global scales. Failure to understand, quantify, and communicate the performance of an active fire detection algorithm, however, can lead to improper interpretations of the spatiotemporal distribution of biomas...

The availability of water surface inundation with high spatial resolution is of fundamental importance in several applications such as hydrology, meteorology and ecology. Medium spatial resolution sensors, like MODerate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), exhibit a significant potential to study inundation dynamics over large areas because of their high temporal resolution. However, t...

Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) images were compared to Terra-MODIS imagery for detecting forest changes in northern Maine’s industrial forest. Advantages of MODIS imagery compared to medium spatial resolution imagery, like Landsat TM or ETM+, are its temporal frequency, its low data volume to cover large forest regions and, the data are free to download over the Internet. The obje...

[1] Cloud microphysical observations collected in situ during the VAMOS Ocean-Cloud-Atmosphere-Land Study Regional Experiment within the Chile-Peru stratocumulus cloud deck during October–November 2008 were used to assess MODIS Level 2 cloud property retrievals. The in situ aircraft-derived cloud property values were constructed from the drop size distributions measured by the Cloud Droplet Pro...

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...

An understanding of the surface albedo of high latitudes is crucial for climate change studies. MODIS albedo retrievals flagged as high quality compare well with in situ Greenland Climate Network (GC-Net) measurements but cover too small an area to fully characterize Greenland's albedo in non-summer months. In contrast, poor quality MODIS retrievals provide adequate spatio-temporal coverage, bu...

Monitoring systems benefit from high temporal frequency image data collected from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) system. Because of near-daily global coverage, MODIS data are beneficial to applications that require timely information about vegetation condition related to drought, flooding, or fire danger. Rapid satellite data streams in operational applications have c...

Over the period from February 24-28, 2003, the albedo of two partially snow-covered sites in northwestern Iowa was characterized to validate snow albedos retrieved from data collected by NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument. Below average snowfall provided the opportunity to evaluate the accuracy of snow albedos retrievals from the current MODIS snow-albedo al...

This paper reports results of an experiment LRVE (Leaf Area Index Retrieval and Validation Experiment) that was conducted over agricultural areas of Central India during winter season of 2001-02, aimed at relating field measurements of LAI to space borne IRS LISS-III data, preparation of site-level LAI maps and validation of MODIS-based 1 km LAI global fields,. Measurements of fieldlevel LAI, a...

Bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) archetypes extracted from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) BRDF/Albedo product over the global Earth Observing System Land Validation Core Sites can be used to simplify BRDF models. The present study attempts to evaluate the representativeness of BRDF archetypes for surface reflectance anisotropy. Five-year forward-...