EO Atlas
About
Datasets/MCD12Q1
d005·dataset

What covers the land (forest, city, crops)

MODIS Combined Land Cover Yearly 500m
LP DAAC MCD12Q1 500 m yearly HDF-EOS2 landland-coverbiodiversity

The canonical NASA annual global land-cover product. 17 IGBP land-cover classes; widely cited as reference data for foundation-model training.

MODIS Combined Land Cover Yearly 500m

The canonical NASA annual global land-cover product. 17 IGBP land-cover classes; widely cited as reference data for foundation-model training.

Access

Gotchas

  • Annual at end of year — not real-time
  • Class boundaries are noisy at pixel level; aggregate for stability
  • Use MCD12Q2 for phenology; MCD12C1 for coarser climate-model classes
  • Other datasets: d003
  • Questions: q01

Sources

The access details, code, and sources below are kept in the original English for technical accuracy.

Quick access (cloud-direct)

mcd12q1_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="MCD12Q1",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream from LP DAAC
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.

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