National Aeronautics and Space Administration

The latest MODIS GPP (gross primary productivity) product, MOD17A2H, has great advantages over the previous version, MOD17A2, because the resolution increased from 1000 m to 500 m. In this study, MOD17A2H GPP was assessed using the latest eddy covariance (EC) flux data (FLUXNET2015 Dataset) at eighteen sites in six ecosystems across the globe. The sensitivity of MOD17A2H GPP to the meteorology dataset and the fractional photosynthetically- active radiation (FPAR) product was explored by introducing site meteorology observations and improved Global Land Surface Satellite (GLASS) Leaf Area Index (LAI) products. The results showed that MOD17A2H GPP underestimated flux-derived GPP at most sites. Its performance in estimating annual GPP was poor (R² = 0.62) and even worse over eight days (R² = 0.52). For the MOD17A2H algorithm, replacing the reanalysis meteorological datasets with the site meteorological measurements failed to improve the estimation accuracies. However, great improvements in estimating the site-based GPP were gained by replacing MODIS FPAR with GLASS FPAR. This indicated that in the existing MOD17A2H product, the errors were originated more from FPAR than the meteorological data. We further examined the potential error contributions from land cover classification and maximum light use efficiency (ε_max). It was found that the current land cover classification scheme exhibited frequent misclassification errors. Moreover, the ε_max value assigned in MOD17A2H was much smaller than the inferred ε_max value. Therefore, the qualities of FPAR and land cover classification datasets should be upgraded, and the ε_max value needs to be adjusted to provide more accurate GPP estimates using MOD17A2H for global ecosystems.