SAFARI 2000 MODIS Water Vapor Data for Southern Africa AERONET Sites

February 24, 2000, through March 4, 2002, this dataset provides daily time series of total column precipitable water vapor over 17 AERONET sunphotometer sites in southern Africa. The MODIS Atmosphere Group at NASA generated these statistics by extracting pixel values from the MOD05_L2 product within a 50 x 50 km box centered on each site. Data is stored in CSV files, with separate files per site per year for infrared and near-infrared retrieval algorithms.

Use Cases

• Validating MODIS near-infrared water vapor retrievals against AERONET ground measurements at specific sites.
• Analyzing spatial variability of atmospheric water vapor within a 50 x 50 km area around each AERONET station.
• Studying temporal trends in total column precipitable water vapor over southern Africa from 2000 to 2002.
• Comparing the performance of infrared versus near-infrared retrieval algorithms for water vapor under different conditions.

Strengths

• Provides data from 17 distinct AERONET ground measurement sites for validation.
• Offers daily temporal resolution over a multi-year period (2000-2002).
• Includes two independent retrieval methods (infrared and near-infrared) for the same variable.

Limitations

• Exact row count, file size, and specific column names are not provided by any source.
• Sources conflict on the last updated date, with one listing 2002-03-04 and another listing 2026-03 12.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) MODIS Atmosphere Group.

Collection Method

Statistics generated from MODIS MOD05_L2 radiance data by extracting pixel values within a 50 x 50 km box centered on AERONET site coordinates.

Time Range

February 24, -2000 through March 4, 2002

Freshness

2026-03-12 22:16:50.021462

Geography

Seventeen AERONET sunphotometer measurement sites in southern Africa.