remote sensing Article Evaluation of the MODIS (C6) Daily Albedo Products for Livingston Island, Antarctic Alejandro Corbea-Pérez 1, * , Javier F. Calleja 2 , Carmen Recondo 1 and Susana Fernández 3   Citation: Corbea-Pérez, A.; Calleja, J.F.; Recondo, C.; Fernández, S. Evaluation of the MODIS (C6) Daily Albedo Products for Livingston Island, Antarctic. Remote Sens. 2021, 13, 2357. https://doi.org/10.3390/ rs13122357 Academic Editor: Yi Luo Received: 11 May 2021 Accepted: 13 June 2021 Published: 16 June 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). 1 Remote Sensing Applications (RSApps) Research Group, Department of Mining Exploitation and Prospecting, University of Oviedo, 33600 Mieres, Spain; mdrecondo@uniovi.es 2 Remote Sensing Applications (RSApps) Research Group, Department of Physics, University of Oviedo, 33007 Oviedo, Spain; jfcalleja@uniovi.es 3 Mathematical Modelling (MOMA) Research Group, Department of Geology, University of Oviedo, 33005 Oviedo, Spain; fernandezmsusana@uniovi.es * Correspondence: corbeaalejandro@uniovi.es Abstract: Although extensive research of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) albedo data is available on the Greenland Ice Sheet, there is a lack of studies evaluating MODIS albedo products over Antarctica. In this paper, MOD10A1, MYD10A1, and MCD43 (C6) daily albedo products were compared with the in situ albedo data on Livingston Island, South Shetland Islands (SSI), Antarctica, from 2006 to 2015, for both all-sky and clear-sky conditions, and for the entire study period and only the southern summer months. This is the first evaluation in which MYD10A1 and MCD43 are also included, which can be used to improve the accuracy of the snow BRDF/albedo modeling. The best correlation was obtained with MOD10A1 in clear-sky conditions (r = 0.7 and RMSE = 0.042). With MCD43, only data from the backup algorithm could be used, so the correlations obtained were lower (r = 0.6). However, it was found that there was no significant difference between the values obtained for all-sky and for clear-sky data. In addition, the MODIS products were found to describe the in situ data trend, with increasing albedo values in the range between 0.04 decade −1 and 0.16 decade −1 . We conclude that MODIS daily albedo products can be applied to study the albedo in the study area. Keywords: albedo; Antarctica; MODIS snow albedo; in-situ albedo; albedo trend 1. Introduction Albedo or bi-hemispherical reflectance is the ratio of the radiant flux reflected from a unit surface area into the whole hemisphere to the incident radiant flux of hemispherical angular extent [1]. The albedo analysis is of interest both to climatology in general [2] and to the climatology of polar areas in particular. Snow cover has a significant impact on the hydrological cycle during winter and spring on the Earth’s surface [3], mainly in the polar areas, where melting of the permafrost would lead to an increase in temperature due to the release of greenhouse gases [4]. However, the greater or lesser degree of surface melting is not only due to changes in temperature; an albedo increase would cause the snow to absorb a smaller amount of short-wave radiation, which would lead to a reduction in the energy available for melting [5]. It is known that variations in albedo are strongly related to the surface energy balance and the available melting energy [6–9]. Thus, albedo analysis in the polar areas is essential for the study of climate change. Satellite observations are currently essential for observing the evolution of the albedo in polar areas, mainly in Antarctica, where, due to adverse weather conditions, the weather station network is not able to cover the entire territory. Thus, for example, Laine [10] used satellite data to analyze the albedo behavior in five sectors around Antarctica (the Weddell Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the Ross Sea, and the Bellingshausen-Amundsen Sea) between 1981 and 2000, finding an increasing albedo trend during spring and summer Remote Sens. 2021, 13, 2357. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13122357 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/remotesensing