True surface colors, daily near real-time (Terra, 250 m)
What it measures. Daily near-real-time surface reflectance for two MODIS bands at 250-meter resolution, showing land colors as they would appear at ground level with the atmosphere's effects removed.
How it's made. Made from the MODIS sensor on the Terra satellite, corrected for gases and aerosols and placed on a daily global grid, with results delivered quickly for timely use.
How & where you'd use it. Useful for rapid land monitoring such as fires, floods, and vegetation change. It works best alongside the MOD09GA product, which stores the matching quality and viewing-angle information.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2021-02-07 → 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/Terra Surface Reflectance Daily L2G Global 250m SIN Grid, Near Real Time (NRT) like other 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. This product, with short name MOD09GQ provides Bands 1 and 2 at a 250-meter resolution in a daily gridded L2G product in the Sinusoidal projection. Science Data Sets provided for this product include reflectance for Bands 1 and 2 a quality rating observation coverage and observation number. This product is meant to be used in conjunction with MOD09GA where important quality and viewing geometry information is stored.
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="MOD09GQ",
version="6.1NRT",
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.