Climate Publications

King, M. D., W. P. Menzel, Y. J. Kaufman, D. Tanre, B.-C. Gao, S. Platnick, S. A. Ackerman, L. A. Remer, R. Pincus, and P. A. Hubanks, 2003: Cloud and aerosol properties, precipitable water, and profiles of temperature and humidity from MODIS. IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens., 41, 442-458.

Abstract
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) is an earth-viewing sensor that flies on the Earth Observing System (EOS) Terra and Aqua satellites, launched in 1999 and 2002, respectively. MODIS scans a swath width of 2330 km that is sufficiently wide to provide nearly complete global coverage every two days from a polar-orbiting, sun-synchronous, platform at an altitude of 705 km. MODIS provides images in 36 spectral bands between 0.415 and 14.235 µm with spatial resolutions of 250 m (2 bands), 500 m (5 bands) and 1000 m (29 bands). These bands have been carefully selected to enable advanced studies of land, ocean, and atmospheric properties. Twenty-six bands are used to derive atmospheric properties such as cloud mask, atmospheric profiles, aerosol properties, total precipitable water, and cloud properties. In this paper we describe each of these atmospheric data products, including characteristics of each of these products such as file size, spatial resolution used in producing the product, and data availability.
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September 16, 2008 in Publications
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