Dr. Dongdong Wang, Associate Research Professor, and Prof. Shunlin Liang recently received a NASA grant titled “Improved land products of incident downward shortwave radiation and photosynthetically active radiation from MODIS data”. This project aims to generate an improved global product suite of insolation and photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) over land surfaces from MODIS data. Insolation, also known as downward shortwave radiation (DSR) and its visible portion PAR are required by almost all land surface models. Previous satellite products of DSR and PAR typically have coarse spatial resolutions that fail to meet the requirements of land process modeling and data analysis.

Funded through the NASA ROSES 2013 program, the team has developed the first operational global 5km land DSR (MCD18A1) and PAR (MCD18A2) products from MODIS data. Based on the success of that project, this new project focuses on product maintenance and algorithm refinements. A refined MCD18A product suite with higher spatial resolution and improved accuracy will be developed for the international scientific community.