MODIS snow products are archived in compressed HDF-EOS format, which employs point, swath, and grid structures to geolocate the data fields to geographic coordinates. This data compression should be transparent to most users since HDF capable software tools automatically uncompress the data. Various software packages, including several in the public domain, support the HDF-EOS data format. See the Software and Tools section for details. Also, see the Hierarchical Data Format - Earth Observing System (HDF-EOS) Web site for more information about the HDF-EOS data format, as well as tutorials in uncompressing the data and converting data to binary format.
Data can also be obtained in GeoTIFF format from Reverb | ECHO, NASA's Next Generation Earth Science Discovery Tool.
MOD10A2 consists of 2400 x 2400 cells of tiled data in a sinusoidal projection. Each data granule contains the following HDF-EOS local attribute fields, which are stored with their associated Scientific Data Set (SDS):
Each data granule also contains metadata either stored as global attributes or as HDF-predefined fields, which are stored with each SDS.
A Summary of MOD10A2/MYD10A2 Bit Values provides an interpretation of bit values and resulting integer values for the Eight Day Snow Cover Field.
External Metadata File
A separate ASCII text file containing metadata with a .xml file extension accompanies the HDF-EOS file. The metadata file contains some of the same metadata as in the product file, but also includes other information regarding archiving, user support, and post-production Quality Assessment (QA) relative to the granule ordered. The post-production QA metadata may or may not be present depending on whether or not the data granule was investigated for quality assessment. The metadata file should be examined to determine if post-production QA was applied to the granule.