MODIS ET (MOD16)
Gov-Public
Global actual ET from MODIS, 500m, 8-day/monthly/annual — a Penman-Monteith water-balance term, ready-made.
SSEBop
ActiveUSGS operational ET at Landsat resolution — 30m actual evapotranspiration for water-rights and irrigation accounting.
by USGS EROS
- Pricing
- Gov-Public
- License
- US Government (public domain)
- Commercial use
- Permitted
- Ecosystem
- Python, GDAL
- Platform
- Windows, macOS, Linux
About SSEBop
SSEBop (Operational Simplified Surface Energy Balance) combines Landsat thermal imagery with reference ET to produce actual evapotranspiration at 30m resolution across the US and, increasingly, globally, updated operationally by USGS EROS. The 30m resolution — far finer than MODIS-based products — makes it usable at field and parcel scale, not just catchment scale.
It underpins several state water-rights accounting systems and is a common input to consumptive-use studies where MOD16's 500m grid is simply too coarse to resolve individual fields or diversions.
Where it fits in the workflow
TerrainCatchmentRainfallRunoffRoutingHydraulicsMappingReporting
Alternatives to SSEBop
Ranked by the topics, categories and workflow stages they share with SSEBop.
MODIS LST
Gov-Public
1km daily/8-day land surface temperature from MODIS — the standard thermal input for energy-balance ET and snowmelt.
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.