What year is the MODIS land use data after 3.9?

[chenjunwen]

Since WPS 3.9, the updated land use data are now derived from a variant of the 20-class, 30-arc-second MODIS data (i.e. modis_landuse_20class_30s_with_lakes). I am wondering what year of the data is? Is it 2010? Many thanks.

 

[Ming Chen]

The dataset is most likely based on data collected during 2001- 2004. It originally came from Boston University, with some modifications by NCEP. NCEP has added new categories based on some other data sets, and has remapped certain categories to other indices.

Some extra information probably can be found in this paper:
Broxton, P. D., Zeng, X., Sulla-Menashe, D., & Troch, P. A. (2014). A global land cover climatology using MODIS data. Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, 53(6), 1593-1605. DOI: 10.1175/JAMC-D-13-0270.1

 

[politeness]

The lack of sufficient metadata for the WPS datasets is a big issue.

It is my understanding that the "modis_landuse_20class_30s_with_lakes" dataset has always been based on 2001 Aqua+Terra data
(e.g., https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/2014JD021871)

It could be that the base years for the MODIS landuse dataset in WPS has changed over time (e.g., V3.x - V4.x), but I can't find any documentation of that.

 

[Ming Chen]

I will talk to our expert and see whether we can add sufficient information about the WPS data to WRF documents.