This series of products from MODIS represents the only daily global composites available and is suitable for use at global and regional levels. This True Color band composition (Bands 1 4 3 | Red, Green, Blue) most accurately shows how we see the earth’s surface with our own eyes. It is a natural looking image that is useful for land surface, oceanic and atmospheric analysis. There are four True Color products in total. For each satellite (Aqua and Terra) there is a 250 meter corrected reflectance product and a 500 meter surface reflectance product. Although the resolution is coarser than other satellites, this allows for a global collection of imagery on a daily basis, which is made available in near real-time. In contrast, Landsat needs 16 days to collect a global composite. Besides the maximum resolution difference, the surface and corrected reflectance products also differ in the algorithm used for atmospheric correction.NASA Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS)This image layer provides access to a subset of the NASA Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS), which are a set of standard services to deliver global, full-resolution satellite imagery. The GIBS goal is to enable interactive exploration of NASA's Earth imagery for a broad range of users. The purpose of this image layer, and the other GIBS image services hosted by Esri, is to enable convenient access to this beautiful and useful satellite imagery for users of ArcGIS. The source data used by this image layer is a finished image; it is not recommended for quantitative analysis.Several full resolution, global imagery products are built and served by GIBS in near real-time (usually within 3.5 hours of observation). These products are built from NASA Earth Observing System satellites data courtesy of LANCE data providers and other sources. The MODIS instrument aboard Terra and Aqua satellites, the AIRS instrument aboard Aqua, and the OMI instrument aboard Aura are used as sources. Several of the MODIS global products are made available on this Esri hosted service.This image layer hosted by Esri provides direct access to one of the GIBS image products. The Esri servers do not store any of this data itself. Instead, for each received data request, multiple image tiles are retrieved from GIBS, which are then processed and assembled into the proper image for the response. This processing takes place on-the-fly, for each and every request. This ensures that any update to the GIBS data is immediately available in the Esri mosaic service.Note on Time: The image service supporting this map is time enabled, but time has been disabled on this image layer so that the most recent imagery displays by default. If you would like to view imagery over time, you can update the layer properties to enable time animation and configure time settings. The results can be saved in a web map to use later or share with others.
