True surface color, near real-time (Terra, daily, 500 m–1 km)
What it measures. A near-real-time look at the true color of the land and water surface, showing what colors and brightness things would have if you stripped away the haze and gas in the air between the ground and the satellite. It covers seven color bands at 500-meter detail, plus quality and viewing-angle information.
How it's made. Built quickly from the MODIS instrument on NASA's Terra satellite, with raw measurements corrected for atmospheric effects and snapped onto a daily map grid.
How & where you'd use it. Because it arrives fast, it's handy for tracking unfolding events like floods, fires, dust storms, or vegetation changes, and it serves as the starting ingredient for many other MODIS land maps.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2015-12-06 → ongoing
- Measured byTERRA (MODIS)
- Processing levelLevel 2G
- Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
- FormatsHDF-EOS
- 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 MODIS Near Real Time (NRT) Surface Reflectance products are an estimate of the surface spectral reflectance as it would be measured at ground level in the absence of atmospheric scattering or absorption. Low-level data are corrected for atmospheric gases and aerosols, yielding a level-2 basis for several higher-order gridded level-2 (L2G) and level-3 products. MOD09GA provides Bands 1-7 in a daily gridded L2G product in the Sinusoidal projection, which includes 500-meter reflectance values and 1-kilometer observation and geolocation statistics. 500-meter Science Data Sets provided by this product include reflectance for Bands 1-7, a quality rating, observation coverage, observation number, and 250-meter scan information. 1-kilometer Science Data Sets provided include number of observations, quality state, sensor angles, solar angles, geolocation flags, and orbit pointers.Additional information at LPDAAC:https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/dataset_discovery/modis/modis_products_table
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="MOD09GA",
version="6NRT",
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 LANCEMODISBrowsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.