Abstract:
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) precipitable water product consists of vertical column water-vapor amounts in centimeters (cm) at 1-km spatial resolution. The SAFARI 2000 product, provided in flat binary data files, is a subset of the official MODIS Level 2 MOD05 product in EOS Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) format. Specifically, the SAFARI product contains data from
... daytime-only MODIS granules over southern Africa for the period August 21, 2000, through September 20, 2000. A granule is the data collected over the full MODIS swath in a five-minute period. Further, the SAFARI product contains values generated by the MODIS near-infrared algorithm applied over clear land areas only (determined via the QA bit field). All values were derived from MODIS on the morning-pass Terra satellite. The product is very sensitive to boundary-layer water vapor since it is derived from attenuation of reflected solar light from the surface. This data product is essential to understanding the hydrological cycle, aerosol properties, aerosol-cloud interactions, energy budget, and climate.The MOD05 water vapor data files were converted from their original HDF format to flat binary files for this SAFARI 2000 data set. The conversion was performed using code developed in the Interactive Data Language (IDL) Version 5.5. The following Scientific Data Sets (SDS) are provided in this data set: Latitude; Longitude; Sensor_Zenith; and Water_Vapor_Near_Infrared. 
