How green the land gets through the year, NDVI (MODIS Terra, 250 m)
What it measures. A smoothed, gap-filled record of how green the land is over the course of a year, captured through NDVI, a greenness index that rises and falls with plant growth. Resolution is 250 meters.
How it's made. Built from MODIS surface-reflectance data on NASA's Terra satellite: the 8-day reflectance product is turned into NDVI, then smoothed and gap-filled into an annual Level-4 product.
How & where you'd use it. Useful for tracking the seasonal cycle of vegetation, the timing of green-up and senescence, and year-to-year changes in plant growth across the landscape.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2001-01-01 → ongoing
- Measured byTerra (MODIS)
- Processing levelLevel 4
- 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 NDVI Phenology annual L4 250m SIN Grid product, with short-name MOD09Q1P_NDVI is a Gap-filled Smoothed NDVI created from the MOD09A1 8-day Surface Reflectance product. The spatial resolution is 250 meter. MOD09Q1P_NDVI is stored in Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) with sinusodial projection, same as other standard MODIS land products.
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="MOD09Q1P_NDVI",
version="6",
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. Official links
- Search and order products from LAADS website. GET DATA
- Direct access to MOD09Q1G_NDVI data set. GET DATA
- User Guide for MOD09GFS and MOD15GFS Version 2.0 VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- Direct link to Collection's OPeNDAP directory USE SERVICE API