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Full catalog/MOD02QKM
MOD02QKM·v7·dataset

Raw color brightness of Earth at 250 m (Terra)

MODIS/Terra Calibrated Radiances 5-Min L1B Swath 250m V7
land NASA LAADS Level 1B active NetCDF-4
In plain English

What it measures. Calibrated measurements of how much light the satellite's camera recorded at 250-meter detail in a visible-red and a near-infrared band, with each pixel located on the map. In plain terms, it is the raw color brightness of Earth's surface as seen from orbit.

How it's made. Comes from the MODIS instrument on NASA's Terra satellite, which converts raw sensor counts into properly calibrated, geolocated light readings (a Level-1B product).

How & where you'd use it. A building-block input that most people use indirectly: it feeds higher-level products like vegetation, fire, and land-cover maps rather than being read directly.

What's measured

SPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › INFRARED WAVELENGTHS › INFRARED RADIANCESPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › INFRARED WAVELENGTHS › REFLECTED INFRAREDSPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › VISIBLE WAVELENGTHS › VISIBLE RADIANCE

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2000-02-24 → ongoing
  • Measured byTerra (MODIS)
  • Processing levelLevel 1B
  • Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
  • FormatsNetCDF-4
  • StatusACTIVE

What you can do with it

  • Track deforestation, fire scars and land-cover change
  • Monitor crop and vegetation health (NDVI/EVI)
  • Map how built-up vs. green an area is over time
Official description

The Terra MODIS (Moderate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) Level-1B (L1B) product includes calibrated and geolocated at-aperture radiances for 36 bands generated from MODIS Level-1A raw sensor counts. The radiances are provided in watts/m2/micrometer/steradian. The Terra MODIS L1B product is a set three datasets (MOD02QKM, MOD02HKM, and MOD021KM) that are produced to address the three spatial-resolution variations: 250 m, 500 m, and 1000 m. This landing page describes the quarter-kilometer product with a short-name MOD02QKM. It provides calibrated radiances derived from the 250-m at-nadir visible band-1 and near-infrared band-2 that have central wavelengths at 0.645 µm and 0.858 µm, respectively. Each 250-m band has 40 detectors in the along-track direction. The MOD02QKM product contains the following two Science Data Sets (SDS) besides geolocation fields for latitude and longitude, quality flags, error estimates, etc. <html> <body> <table> <tr> <th>SDS Variable</th> <th>Long-name</th> </tr> <tr> <td>EV_250_RefSB</td> <td>Earth View 250M Reflective Solar Bands Scaled Integers</td> </tr> <tr> <td>EV_250_RefSB_Uncert_Indexes</td> <td>Earth View 250M Reflective Solar Bands Uncertainty Indexes</td> </tr> </table> </body> </html> <br> The v7.0 Terra MODIS MOD02QKM in netCDF4 format represents the most current version of this product that has undergone around half-a-dozen reprocessing cycles in the last 2.5 decades. Each 250-m swath granule or data-file temporally spans 5 minutes and its image dimensions measure 8,120 lines (along-track direction) by 5,416 samples (cross-track direction). The v7.0 collection’s data record starts from February 24, 2000 (2000–055). Consult the MODIS L1B User Guide to understand how to convert the per-pixel scaled integers to radiance or reflectance.

Get the data

mod02qkm_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="MOD02QKM",
    version="7",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from LAADS
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.