Local Climatic History
Monthly vegetation and land-surface thermal history for any place on Earth, sampled from NASA's Terra MODIS record through the Oak Ridge National Laboratory DAAC.
The numbers above come from NASA
Two MODIS products on NASA's Terra satellite, delivered through Oak Ridge National Laboratory — public, free, no login.
How EarthPulse processes these signals
- Pull every available MODIS composite for the selected point and window.
- Apply NASA's QA flags — drop pixels marked as snow, cloud, or not produced.
- Take the monthly median so a single bad composite doesn't dominate.
- Overlay a 12-month centred rolling mean to strip seasonal cycles.
- Fit linear trends to the smoothed series before and after the intervention.
What we're not doing yet
Sampling is a single 250 m pixel at the project centroid — a patch the size of a small farm, not the entire project. A flat NDVI can mean the intervention worked at scale but missed this specific pixel. Pre-intervention windows are sometimes short (4 years at Al Baydha) or pre-date the MODIS record entirely (Loess Plateau, White Oak Pastures). We don't yet report confidence intervals, p-values, or an interrupted time-series significance test, and there's no climatically-matched control site. Treat the slope inflection as a suggestive signal, not a peer-reviewed attribution.