Abstract
The first Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) (Salomonson et al., 1989) was launched in December 1999 on the polar orbiting NASA Earth Observing System (EOS) Terra satellite and the second MODIS was launched on the polar orbiting Aqua satellite in May 2002. Each MODIS acquires daily global data in 36 spectral bands—29 with 1 km, 5 with 500 m and 2 with 250 m nadir pixels. The Terra and Aqua satellites have exterior orientation (position and attitude) measurement systems designed to enable unaided navigation of MODIS data to within approximately 150 m (1σ) at nadir. A global network of ground control points has been used to improve the geolocation accuracy for MODIS/Terra to better than 45 m and for MODIS/Aqua to better than 60 m. This chapter contains an overview of the geolocation approach, a summary of nearly four years of MODIS/Terra and one and one half years of MODIS/Aqua geolocation results, an overview of ongoing work, and a discussion of the applicability of this approach to future missions. The MODIS approach allows an operational characterization of the MODIS geolocation errors and enables individual MODIS observations to be geo-located to the sub-pixel accuracies required for terrestrial global change applications (Townshend et al., 1992; Justice et al., 1998; Roy, 2000).
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© 2006 Tsinghua University Press, Beijing and Springer-Verlag GmbH Berlin Heidelberg
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Wolfe, R.E. (2006). MODIS Geolocation. In: Qu, J.J., Gao, W., Kafatos, M., Murphy, R.E., Salomonson, V.V. (eds) Earth Science Satellite Remote Sensing. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-37293-6_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-37293-6_4
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