Bi-directional reflectance properties of the land surface over Canada derived from MODIS
 multispectral observations at 1-km spatial resolution, 2000-2004

The MODIS data are an important component of the Climate Change program as they provide 
high quality measurements of fundamental land surface properties of the Canadian climate 
system at the national scale. Satellite data are the only source of information that 
offers national scale coverage and high frequency of observations. To produce these data 
we relied on MODIS pre-processed data available from NASA Distributed Active Archive Center 
(DAAC).  The original MOD43B1 data set is available as a set of granules (1200x1200 pixels) in 
EOS HDF format and ISIN projection. At the first step, we processed all granules that cover 
the Canadian territory and composed them into one large image in Lat-Long projection.  
For the second step, images in the Lat-Long projection were re-projected into LCC 
(Lambert Conformal Conical) projection. To minimize re-projection errors, the procedure was 
applied to super-sampled data using 3x3 matrix for each pixel with subsequent weighted 
averaging in order to preserve the 1 km/pixel spatial resolution.

The MODIS data are valuable for many climate change and environmental applications such as 
land cover mapping, vegetation dynamics (Vegetation Indices), Fraction of Photosynthetically 
Active Radiation (FPAR), Leaf Area Index (LAI), forest disturbances (insect and forest fire), 
snow/ice mapping, radiation budget and cloud and aerosol radiative forcing. 

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