10-Day MODIS Land Surface Reflectance Product

A key data requirement of the U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Foreign Agricultural Service (USDA FAS) for integrating NASA earth science data into its decision support system is consistency with the 10-day product time boundaries of existing FAS products.  This is because the incorporation of a new data stream into an operational environment needs to be transparent, with minimal disturbance to ongoing operations.

The 10-Day MODIS Land Surface Reflectance product was created using the v4.0.11 code of  MODIS Level 3 8-day Land Surface Reflectance (MOD_PR09A1), written by Eric Vermote and Jim Ray of the MODIS Land Science Team. Minor modifications were introduced into the construction of the PCF file, in order for the code to accept 10/11 MODIS tiles for reading. There was no change in the order of compositing of the pixels across days and orbits, i.e., compositing within orbits according to the orbital coverage of the pixel and the priority of the pixel (the pixel's score), and then compositing across orbits according to the channel 3 reflectance.