Spatial homogeneity from temporal stability: Exploiting the combined hyper-frequent revisit of Terra and Aqua to guide Earth System Science

Abstract The terrestrial component of the Earth system has witnessed considerable changes in the past decades due to anthropogenic action. Throughout this period, the NASA Terra mission has been constantly monitoring the surface with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument. When combined with the MODIS instrument on-board of the Aqua platform, we obtain a hyper-frequent revisit capability providing sub-daily observations globally at a moderate resolution of ~250 m, but with a strong multi-angular variation of the observation footprint. Here we propose to exploit this particular configuration provided by the combined Terra + Aqua constellation to infer spatial ho…