AppEARS is a NASA website for downloading, subsetting, and projecting satellite data, but it is mainly used for processing MODIS products

Here we will learn how to download and preprocess MODIS data in a batch:

  1. I usually first check the data information (like the name, here MOD11A2) on the LP daac NASA website. To do that simply search "MODIS LST LP daac" on google (you can do the same for any other product that you want for example "MODIS NDVI LP daac")

Here we can get some good information such as product name (Here: MOD11A2 for the land surface temperature)

there is also information about the layers in each of the LST granules for instance here we can understand that:

  • The LST unit is Kelvin

  • We need to multiply each value by 0.02 (scale factor) to get the temperature in Kelvin


Downloading MODIS Data from AppEARS

To download MODIS data from Appears website do the following steps:

  1. Search "appears NASA" in google and click on the first search

  2. you need an earthdata account to sign in to appears, if you already have one just click on the green sign in button and enter your earth data credential otherwise you need to register first


3. Then you should click on the Extract menu at the top left and choose Area



4. then you will be prompted to a new page where you should choose Start a new request



5. in the next step a name for the sample should be selected (a relevant name for the job)

6. select an area to extract the satellite product, you can use the button on the lower right corner of the map to select the area by bounding box or polygon or a shapefile

Then You should choose the date and the products, the feature that I like the most is that you can choose from all different modis product project them and bundle them in one netcdf file