In terms of the space cities occupy, urbanization appears as a minor land transformation. However, it permanently modifies land’s ecological functions, altering its carbon, energy, and water fluxes. It is therefore necessary to develop a land cover characterization at fine spatial and temporal scales to capture urbanization’s effects on surface fluxes. We develop a series of biophysical vegetation parameters such as the fraction of photosynthetically active radiation, leaf area index, vegetation greenness fraction, and roughness length over the continental US using MODIS and Landsat products for 2001. A 13-class land cover map was developed at a climate modeling grid (CMG) merging the 500 m MODIS land cover and the 30 m impervious surface area from the National Land Cover Database. The landscape subgrid heterogeneity was preserved using fractions of each class from the 500 m and 30 m into the CMG. Biophysical parameters were computed using the 8-day composite Normalized Difference Vegetation Index produced by the North American Carbon Program. In addition to urban impact assessments, this dataset is useful for the computation of surface fluxes in land, vegetation, and urban models and is expected to be widely used in different land cover and land use change applications.
Spatial Coverage: Continental US
Temporal Coverage: 2001
Resolution: 5 km
Projection: Albers Equal Area projection
Data Type: Floating Point
Data Format:BSQ
Lahouari Bounoua, Ping Zhang, Kurtis Thome, et al., “Mapping Biophysical Parameters for Land Surface Modeling over the Continental US Using MODIS and Landsat,” Dataset Papers in Science, vol. 2015, Article ID 564279, 11 pages, 2015. doi:10.1155/2015/564279
Priniciple Investigator: Lahouari Bounoua
Project Information
PROJECT NAME | Principal Investigator | INSTITUTION |
---|---|---|
Combining Satellite Data and Models to Assess the Impacts of Urbanization on the Continental United States Surface Climate. | Lahouari Bounoua | NASA GSFC |