Temporally smoothed and gap‐filled MODIS land products for carbon modelling: application of the fPAR product

TIMESAT software is used to produce a temporally and spatially Gap‐Filled and Smoothed (GFS) version of the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectro‐radiometer) fPAR (fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation) product (MOD15). We apply this new ƒPAR product within two commonly used carbon and vegetation productivity models, CASA (Carnegie‐Ames‐Stanford Approach) and the MODIS GPP (Gross Primary Production) algorithm (MOD17). The GFS product removes noise present within the original MOD15 fPAR dataset, yet is comparable to the linearly interpolated UMT (University of Montana) fPAR used in the MOD17 algorithm. However, the GSF data provides a realistic fPAR time‐series in relation to magnitude and seasonality associated with radiation in regions where persistent cloud cover is an issue. It is available for North America and the northern part of South America covering the Amazon basin for the MODIS acquisition period (2000–2005).