Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data is available for anyone to use via Amazon S3. Select products are made available daily. MODIS is a joint effort of the U.S. Geological Survey and NASA.
The MODIS instrument is operating on both the Terra and Aqua spacecraft, in orbit since 1999 and 2002, respectively. It has a viewing swath width of 2,330 km and views the entire surface of the Earth every one to two days. Its detectors measure 36 spectral bands and it acquires data at three spatial resolutions: 250-m, 500-m, and 1,000-m. The MCD43A4.006, MOD11A1.006, MYD11A1.006, MOD13A1.006 and MYD13A1.006 products are available for use on Amazon S3, more details on these below.
Learn more about MODIS data on NASA’s MODIS site.
See the Registry of Open Data on AWS entry for this data set.
Each file is its own object in the astraea-opendata Amazon S3 bucket. An object key will look like the following:
/product/horizontal_grid/vertical_grid/date/DATA
For example, the files for an individual scene are available in the following location: astraea-opendata/MCD43A4.006/21/07/2011360/
where:
product = MCD43A4.006 - MODIS product ID
horizontal_grid = 21 - horizontal grid in the MODIS Sinusoidal Tiling System
vertical_grid = 07 - vertical grid in the MODIS Sinusoidal Tiling System
date = 2011360 - year and three-digit day of year representation
DATA - individual object (e.g., granule, metadata or thumbnail)
If you use the AWS Command Line Interface, you can list all available files, download an individual granule, or read the metadata file in the commands below. You must use --requester-payer requester to indicate you realize your AWS account will be charged.
aws s3 ls astraea-opendata --request-payer requester
aws s3 ls s3://astraea-opendata/MCD43A4.006/21/11/2017200/ --request-payer requester --human-readable --summarize
aws s3 cp s3://astraea-opendata/MCD43A4.006/21/11/2017006/MCD43A4.A2017006.h21v11.006.2017018074804_B01.TIF MCD43A4.A2017006.h21v11.006.2017018074804_B01.TIF --request-payer requester
aws s3 cp s3://astraea-opendata/MCD43A4.006/21/11/2017006/MCD43A4.A2017006.h21v11.006.2017018074804_meta.json -
The MODIS MCD43A4 version 6 Nadir Bidirectional reflectance distribution function Adjusted Reflectance (NBAR) data set is a daily 16-day product. The Julian date in the granule ID of each specific file represents the 9th day of the 16 day retrieval period, and consequently the observations are weighted to estimate the Albedo for that day. The MCD43A4 algorithm, as is with all combined products, has the luxury of choosing the best representative pixel from a pool that includes all the acquisitions from both the Terra and Aqua sensors from the retrieval period.
The MCD43A4 provides the 500 meter reflectance data of the MODIS “land” bands 1-7 adjusted using the bidirectional reflectance distribution function to model the values as if they were collected from a nadir view.
aws s3 ls astraea-opendata/MCD43A4.006/
The MOD11A1 & MYD11A1 version 6 products provide ...
aws s3 ls astraea-opendata/MOD11A1.006/ --request-payer requester
aws s3 ls astraea-opendata/MYD11A1.006/ --request-payer requester
The MOD13A1 & MYD13A1 version 6 products provide ...
aws s3 ls astraea-opendata/MOD09GQ.006/ aws s3 ls astraea-opendata/MYD09GQ.006/
The following ARN is for an Amazon SNS topic that provides notifications whenever a new MODIS scene has been added to the bucket on AWS:
arn:aws:sns:us-west-2:552188055668:astraea-opendata-events
This topic publishes an Amazon S3 event message whenever a file has been added. It will only accept subscriptions via Amazon SQS or AWS Lambda.
TBD
If you have questions about the data, you can create an Issue at the s22s/astraea-opendata project repo on GitHub.
There are no restrictions on the use of data, unless expressly identified prior to or at the time of receipt. More information on licensing and data citation is available from USGS.