That allowed the team to turn the two-dimensional images from MODIS into three-dimensional models.

ECONOMIST: Monitoring forests: Seeing the world for the trees | The

The Modis albedo measurements allow scientists to monitor how the Earth's reflectivity changes on a global scale.

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Modis, an IT recruiting and staffing company, recently looked into how offices handle employee March Madness consumption.

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Modis took into account factors such as the number of job openings over the past quarter, growing industries in the area and the intensity in the war for top talent in each of these cities.

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"This product will have a major impact on our carbon budget work, " says Professor Steve Running of the University of Montana, who uses the land cover maps in conjunction with other weekly observations from Modis.

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To calculate this, the team took data from patches of forest studied on the ground, in which every tree's diameter has been recorded, and combined them with images from MODIS and with data from an instrument called GLAS, which bounced laser beams off the Earth's surface between 2003 and 2009.

ECONOMIST: Monitoring forests: Seeing the world for the trees | The