NASA NOAA LTDR: Global Land Surface Climate and Aerosol Data from Polar Satellites
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Description
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
null
Freshness
null
Geography
Global
Data is available in HDF4 and S3 formats; specific tools for reading HDF4 may be required.