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Full catalog/modis-terra-mod16a3gf
modis-terra-mod16a3gf·dataset

Yearly water loss from land to air, 500 m (Terra)

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

What it measures. This sums up a whole year of evapotranspiration, the water moving from soil and plants into the air, plus the associated heat energy, at 500-meter resolution.

How it's made. Generated by ESA Copernicus from NASA's MODIS instrument on Terra with a Penman-Monteith model combining weather reanalysis and satellite data, released as a gap-filled yearly Level-4 product after each year ends.

How & where you'd use it. Useful for annual water-budget accounting, long-term drought and climate analysis, and large-scale water-resource and agricultural planning.

What's measured

MODISTerraNASASatelliteGlobalEvapotranspirationETLatent Heat500mMOD16A3GF

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2001-01-01 → 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 MOD16A3GF Version 6.1 product provides a yearly gap-filled composite of Evapotranspiration (ET) and Latent Heat Flux (LE) at 500 m spatial resolution. The dataset is generated using an algorithm based on the Penman-Monteith equation, which integrates daily meteorological reanalysis data with MODIS-derived variables such as vegetation dynamics, albedo, and land cover. The product is produced 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. Annual ET and PET values represent the sum of daily values over the year, while LE and PLE represent the annual average. Low-resolution browse images for ET and LE are also provided for each granule.

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-mod16a3gf"],   # 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.