NASA NOAA LTDR: Global Land Surface Climate and Aerosol Data from Polar Satellites

The Long-Term Data Record (LTDR) project produces a global land surface climate data record using polar-orbiting satellite data from NOAA AVHRR, MODIS, and VIIRS missions. It generates daily surface reflectance, NDVI, and LAI/fPAR products, and includes a NOAA-20 VIIRS Level-2 aerosol optical thickness product. The data is hosted on AWS Open Data under a CC-BY-4.0 license.

Use Cases

• Modeling global climate change trends based on the long-term, validated climate data record.
• Monitoring vegetation health and phenology using the daily Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) product.
• Studying aerosol optical thickness and properties over land and ocean from the VIIRS dark target algorithm.
• Analyzing leaf area index and fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation for ecological studies.

Strengths

• Integrates data from eight distinct AVHRR missions and bridges multiple satellite sensor systems (AVHRR, MODIS, VIIRS).
• Provides daily global products for surface reflectance, NDVI, and LAI/fPAR.
• The aerosol product offers measurements at a 6 km x 6 km resolution at nadir, derived from 64 native VIIRS pixels.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and total dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

NASA and NOAA, via the Long-Term Data Record (LTDR) project.

Collection Method

Satellite data from polar-orbiting missions (NOAA AVHRR, MODIS, VIIRS) processed using mature and well-tested algorithms.

Time Range

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Freshness

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Geography

Global