summary: Twelve monthly maps of the BRDF parameters for ten spectral bands. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the USA is making available to anyone worldwide maps of the bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) of the ground. They are derived from the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) instrument. MODIS is an instrument aboard the Terra and Aqua satellites of the NASA. It acquires data in several spectral bands, from which among others, three parameters describing the ground albedo can be derived. These three parameters are called fiso, fvol, and fgeo. fiso describes the isotropic part of the BRDF; the two other parameters are linked to the viewing and illuminating geometry and describe the anisotropic part of the BRDF. How to use these parameters to compute the ground albedo is decribed in the reference document. The MODIS data sets are worldwide but restricted to land.They exhibit other irregular data gaps in time and space. MINES ParisTech is proposing a series of 12 maps of the BRDF parameters that have been filled for gaps. There is one map per calendar month. Year has been arbitrarily set to 2000. The maps are available as NetCDF files for ten spectral bands. The files obey GEO format and are part of the GEOSS Data-CORE (Data Collection of Open Resources for Everyone). Parameter 1 is fiso, parameter 2 is fvol, and parameter 3 is fgeo. Latitude ranges from +89.975° down to -89.975°, with a 0.05° grid resulting in 3600 pixels for each column. Longitude ranges from -179.975° to +179.975°, with a 0.05° grid resulting in 7200 pixels for each line. Said differently, pixels are squared with a size of 0.05° and coordinates are those of the center of the pixel.
rights: Data is provided under a Creative Commons licence (CC-BY)(creativecommons.org/licenses/by). Data has been created by MINES ParisTech / Armines. It is available at webservice-energy (tds.webservice-energy.org).
