Albedo data by city

[hsiddiqui31]

I am a science curriculum designer at UC Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science.
We're currently in the early stages of developing a unit in which middle school students write code to create data visualizations that communicate science content.

I'm currently trying to figure out how to acquire data about albedo by city in the U.S? We've come across the visualizations on NASA, but haven't been able to figure out how to obtain raw data that shows albedo values by city in a particular time period.

We're ideally looking for data of albedo values for cities in the United States during the summer months from the last couple of years. That way we could join it with climate data and observe possible temporal and location-based relationships

Any help at all is greatly appreciated!

Thank you,

Hina Siddiqui

[GES DISC - jimacker]

Hello,

There are different types of albedo data in our Giovanni system. Click on the link below to access Giovanni with these variables selected. Giovanni is not difficult to use; you can examine the User Guide to get started, and I will be glad to assist if you encounter difficulty.

https://giovanni.gsfc.nasa.gov/giovanni/#service=TmAvMp&starttime=&endtime=&variableFacets=dataFieldMeasurement%3AAlbedo%3BdataProductPlatformInstrument%3AMERRA-2%20Reanalysis%2CNLDAS%20Model%3B&dataKeyword=Albedo

I could not exclude the "ISCCP Cloud Albedo" with the search facets, but the other variables are surface albedos. Giovanni does not have shapefiles for cities, so you will have to use a bounding box for approximate city boundaries, which could be determined with lat/lon coordinates on Google Maps. The NLDAS variables are for land areas only, so if the bounding box includes water (for a coastal city like Chicago or Boston), the values should only be for albedo on land. The MERRA-2 Reanalysis variables may be different in this regard.

I hope this will be useful for your project.

[GES DISC - jimacker]

One more note about Giovanni; after you have defined your city boundaries, you can then created an Area-Averaged Time Series that will average the albedo values over the entire bounding box, and provide a time-series of values according to the temporal resolution of the variable. This time-series can be downloaded as a CSV file that would be a fairly easy-to-use input for further analyses. I would recommend using the Monthly temporal resolution variables rather than the Hourly (processing by the data provider has already created the mean values for the monthly data variables).

[LP DAAC - dgolon]

Hello @hsiddiqui31 Since you are interested in Albedo data over specific cities, you might be interested in using the Point Extraction feature from AppEEARS: https://appeears.earthdatacloud.nasa.gov/task/point. AppEEARS offers several different albedo datasets that you might be interested in. When selecting the layers to include in the sample on the AppEEARS sample form you can type "Albedo" in the box to see all of them. I will note, their spatial resolution might not meet your needs (500 m and 1,000 m) but in case they do, I figured it was worth mentioning. Thank you - Danielle

[LP DAAC - lien]

Hi Hina,

The MCD43A3 is available through AppEEARS: https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/mcd43a3v061/
The MCD43A3 contains the 7 MODIS Land Bands and 3 broadbands in both Black-Sky and White_Sky Albedo. AppEEARS will allow you to perform a lat long Point search or an area. The point search would bring back the 500 meter pixel value which that point falls in.
Please let us know if you have any questions.
Thanks,
Brett