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Full catalog/modis-terra-mod16a2gf
modis-terra-mod16a2gf·dataset

Water leaving the land into the air, 8-day (Terra)

MODIS Terra Net Evapotranspiration Gap-Filled 8-Day L4 Global 500m
land ESA ESA Copernicus active
In plain English

What it measures. It estimates evapotranspiration, the water that evaporates from soil and is released by plants, plus the related heat energy, at 500-meter detail over 8 days. Cloudy-day gaps are patched for consistency.

How it's made. Produced by ESA Copernicus from NASA's MODIS sensor on Terra using a Penman-Monteith water-balance model fed by weather data and satellite vegetation measurements, as a gap-filled Level-4 product.

How & where you'd use it. Important for managing irrigation and water supplies, monitoring drought, and understanding how landscapes lose water to the atmosphere.

What's measured

MODISTerraNASASatelliteGlobalEvapotranspirationETLatent Heat500mMOD16A2GF

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2000-01-01 → ongoing
  • Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90

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 MOD16A2GF Version 6.1 product provides a gap-filled 8-day composite of Evapotranspiration (ET) and Latent Heat Flux (LE) at 500 m spatial resolution. The dataset is based on an algorithm derived from the Penman-Monteith equation, which integrates daily meteorological reanalysis data with MODIS-derived variables such as vegetation dynamics, albedo, and land cover. The gap-filled product is generated at the end of each year once the complete annual MOD15A2H LAI/FPAR dataset becomes available. Poor-quality LAI/FPAR inputs are identified using quality control flags and replaced through linear interpolation to improve data consistency. The dataset includes layers for ET, LE, Potential Evapotranspiration (PET), and Potential Latent Heat Flux (PLE), along with a quality control layer. ET and PET values represent the sum of daily values within each 8-day compositing period, while LE and PLE represent the average of the same period.

Get the data

copernicus_access.py
# ESA Copernicus Data Space — open STAC API (free account)
from pystac_client import Client

cat = Client.open("https://stac.dataspace.copernicus.eu/v1")
search = cat.search(
    collections=["modis-terra-mod16a2gf"],   # add _cog or _nc for a format variant
    bbox=(-10, 35, 30, 60),             # your area (W,S,E,N)
    datetime="2024-01-01/2024-12-31",
)
items = list(search.items())            # then read assets with rioxarray / xarray
Browsing the Copernicus STAC is open; downloading bytes needs a free Copernicus Data Space account.