I spent the better part of last week wrangling MODIS and other data to get them all into the same projections, so I thought I’d write a quick post on how it all ended up working out, mostly so I don’t forget for next time.
First, for MODIS data there’s a happy tool called the MODIS Reprojection Tool (MRT) which you can download and install (good tutorial on that here). In theory you can just use its GUI to process MODIS data, but that’s only reasonable for a few areas/times, so I highly recommend accessing it in R. For the most part this is easy, because someone else has already dealt with this and written a nice part of the rts package (for ‘raster time series’) called ModisDownload(), which is well described here. The catch is, as always, if you want to do something out of the ordinary. I wanted annual max and range values for LAI and FPAR for 10 years (2001 – 2011) for the continental US in the Albers Equal Area projection. Sooooo… first (after MRT is installed), you just need to figure out what tiles you want, get the files list, download the .hdf files and mosaic them (HDF4, btw). My code to do that is here on git. The only complicated part was figuring out how to get the directory names off the ftp, really. [just occurred to me that I think in the near future (7/20/1016?) this will require your earthexplorer password. Not sure how that will work]. Then the plan was to read in the hdf files as rasters, apply the qc mask from the qc data, and reproject each day, stack them and calculate max and range. The problems being that hdf4 is no joke, and reprojecting takes a LONG time. But I only needed annual numbers in the new projections, so I decided to read in the hdf files as rasters, apply the masks, stack them, calculate max and range, THEN just reproject the 4 x 10 files (or, actually, stack the 4 files per year and reproject the stack). The problem with that is that as far as I know ModisDownload() doesn’t want you to just use it to convert hdf to tif (or raster), even though MRT lets you do it, and I was too lazy to figure out any of the other ways of dealing with HDF4 in R, so I called MRT from the command line within R to write temporary tifs that I could then read back in with raster. There is undoubtedly a faster way to do this, but this only took a few seconds on my desktop. So my code to do all of that is here. In all I think it took about 15 min per year (not bad since I was only doing 10 years). Now would be a good time to mention that the raster package also does this crabby thing where it likes to fill up a temporary directory if you’re opening lots of raster files. Sometimes you’ll get random messages like ‘Closing XXXXX.grid’. If you do this enough you can fill up your hard drive or really irritate your HPC admins. So, per a conversation on stackoverflow (which I can't seem to find now), I have a little chunk of code that first sets the temp directory (use rasterOptions(tmpdir = “C:/your_trash_here”)) then empties it out at the end of each loop. If you look in this aquaxterra directory on git you’ll also find a script to ingest monthly PRISM .asc files, calculate bioclimatic variables and reproject to Albers EA. Enjoy! |
ERSAM Lab ThoughtsThis is where we occasionally post things that are not research, but more than 280 characters. If you want to know what we're working on now, this would be a good place to look. Code will be linked to here and posted on github. Archives
November 2018
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