Snow is an important component of the water cycle, and its estimation in hydrological models is of great significance concerning the simulation and forecasting of flood events due to snow-melt. The assimilation of Snow Cover Area (SCA) in physical distributed hydrological models is a possible source of improvement of snowmelt-related floods. In this study, the assimilation in the LISFLOOD model...

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) has been supplying a continuous data stream since 2000, lending to detailed time series analysis of the global terrestrial environment. This paper explores a quality anomaly present in the tropics relating to the aerosol quantity flag in the daily MODIS surface reflectance products (MOD09 series) and the 16-day Vegetation Index (VI) comp...

A challenging problem in snow mapping is the discrimination of snow from clouds. Snow and clouds often have similar spectral reflectance features across the spectrum and may have similar temperatures making discrimination difficult. Data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) onboard the NASA Earth Observing System (EOS) Terra spacecraft, is used to generate many geophys...

MODIS reflective solar bands are calibrated on-orbit using a solar diffuser and near-monthly lunar observations. To monitor the performance and effectiveness of the on-orbit calibrations, pseudo-invariant targets such as deep convective clouds (DCCs), Libya-4, and Dome-C are used to track the long-term stability of MODIS Level 1B product. However, the current MODIS operational DCC technique (DC...

Satellite-derived snow maps from NASA’s Earth Observing System Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) have been produced since February of 2000. The global maps are available daily at 500-m resolution, and at a climate-modeling grid (CMG) resolution of 1/20o (~5.6 km). We compared the 8-day composite CMG MODIS-derived global maps from November 1, 2001, through March 21, 2002, and...

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Radiometer (MODIS) is the primary instrument in the NASA Earth Observing System for monitoring the seasonality of global terrestrial vegetation. Estimates of 8-day mean daily gross primary production (GPP) at the 1 km spatial resolution are now operationally produced by the MODIS Land Science Team for the global terrestrial surface using a production efficiency a...

[1] This paper analyzes MODIS 1 km albedo kernels of 7 spectral bands over Northern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula and through these kernels develops a new high quality dataset that provides a simple statistical method to scale up spectral and broadband albedos from pixel to arbitrary coarse resolution grid square for use in climate models. This dataset significantly improves characterization...

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...