NASA MODIS products for military land monitoring and management

Abstract : Land managers have a need for products derived from remote sensing instruments on satellites. In 1999 NASA launched the first of its Earth Science Enterprise (ESE) satellites, Terra. Terra is the first satellite whose instruments were designed to complement each other in producing digital products that corrected for atmospheric clarity, surface reflectance, seasonal changes, sun angle, and cloudiness to mention only a few concerns. Though its purpose is to study climatic damage issues, many of these products have potential use to military land managers. The Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) Ecosystem Management Project (SEMP) sponsored a preliminary investigation to access and manipulate several example products generated from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument for storage in the SEMP data repository. The MODIS products include land cover, vegetation indices, leaf area index, net photosynthesis, fraction-of-photosynthetically active radiation, and vegetation cover conversion. This report describes those products, how they were processed, what they look like, and how they can be used for military land monitoring and management.