National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Validation at stage 3 has been achieved for the albedo product (MCD43).

The accuracy of the high quality 500 m MODIS operational albedo is well less than 5% albedo at the majority of the validation sites studied thus far, and even those albedo values with low quality flags have been found to be primarily within 10% of the field data. While the daily retrieval algorithm has been shown to capture rapid changes well, such as snow melt and greenup, the values associated with rapid change may be flagged as lower quality, as the algorithm can lag in response to abrupt reactions seen in field data. Therefore, it is vitally important that users refer to the associated quality flags in the product for use in their research efforts. Furthermore, data with solar zenith angles greater than 70 degrees should be considered suspect for research efforts.

Note that MCD43B products have been discontinued, as they were merely averages of the MCD43A standard 500m gridded products and were of significantly poorer quality. MCD43D* 30arc second gridded products (on a lat/lon climate modeling grid) should be considered instead. We encourage all users to transition to Collection 6.1 land products as soon as they become available, as several known upstream issues have been addressed.

Products prior to Collection 6 should no longer be used for research efforts.