MODIStsp: An R package for automatic preprocessing of MODIS Land Products time series

MODIStsp is a new R package allowing automating the creation of raster time series derived from MODIS Land Products. It allows performing several preprocessing steps (e.g. download, mosaicing, reprojection and resize) on MODIS products on a selected time period and area. All processing parameters can be set with a user-friendly GUI, allowing users to select which specific layers of the original MODIS HDF files have to be processed and which Quality Indicators have to be extracted from the aggregated MODIS Quality Assurance layers. Moreover, the tool allows on-the-fly computation of time series of Spectral Indexes (either standard or custom-specified by the user through the GUI) from surface reflectance bands. Outputs are saved as single-band rasters corresponding to each available acquisition date and output layer. Virtual files allowing easy access to the entire time series as a single file using common image processing/GIS software or R scripts can be also created. Non-interactive execution within an R script and stand-alone execution outside an R environment exploiting a previously created Options File are also possible, the latter allowing scheduling execution of MODIStsp to automatically update a time series when a new image is available. The proposed software constitutes a very useful tool for the Remote Sensing community, since it allows performing all the main preprocessing steps required for the creation of time series of MODIS data within a common framework, and without requiring any particular programming skills by its users. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.