MODIS LST
Gov-Public
1km daily/8-day land surface temperature from MODIS — the standard thermal input for energy-balance ET and snowmelt.
MODIS ET (MOD16)
ActiveGlobal actual ET from MODIS, 500m, 8-day/monthly/annual — a Penman-Monteith water-balance term, ready-made.
by NASA / LP DAAC
- Pricing
- Gov-Public
- License
- US Government (public domain)
- Commercial use
- Permitted
- Ecosystem
- Google Earth Engine, Python, GDAL
- Platform
- Windows, macOS, Linux
About MODIS ET (MOD16)
MOD16 applies a Penman-Monteith-based algorithm to MODIS land cover, LAI/FPAR and meteorological reanalysis inputs to produce global actual evapotranspiration and potential ET at 500m resolution, composited at 8-day, monthly and annual timesteps back to 2000. It is one of the longest-running satellite ET records and a common benchmark in ET-product comparison studies.
For catchment water-balance closure or irrigation-demand screening where installing an eddy-covariance tower isn't an option, MOD16 is usually the first stop before moving to a higher-resolution product like SSEBop.
Where it fits in the workflow
TerrainCatchmentRainfallRunoffRoutingHydraulicsMappingReporting
Alternatives to MODIS ET (MOD16)
Ranked by the topics, categories and workflow stages they share with MODIS ET (MOD16).
SSEBop
Gov-Public
USGS operational ET at Landsat resolution — 30m actual evapotranspiration for water-rights and irrigation accounting.
MODIS Snow Cover
Gov-Public
500m daily/8-day global snow-cover extent from MODIS — the standard optical snow product for basin-scale tracking.
SMAP
Gov-Public
NASA's L-band radiometer soil moisture mission — 9km/36km near-surface moisture, daily, since 2015.
Google Earth Engine
Freemium
Planetary-scale geospatial analysis in the cloud — the data catalogue and compute behind modern water remote sensing.
Microsoft Planetary Computer
Freemium
A STAC API and Jupyter environment over petabytes of satellite data — Sentinel, Landsat, MODIS, ERA5, CHIRPS and more.