Downloading MODIS tiles with rts package in R?

Question

I'm having trouble using ModisDownload(). Every time I use the command, I get the following error message:

Error in .getModisList(x = xx, h = h, v = v, dates = dates, opt = opt,  : 
  Download error: Server does not response!
In addition: Warning messages:
1: In merge.list(list(...), .opts) :
  restarting interrupted promise evaluation
2: In merge.list(list(...), .opts) :
  restarting interrupted promise evaluation
3: In merge.list(list(...), .opts) :
  restarting interrupted promise evaluation
4: In merge.list(list(...), .opts) :
  restarting interrupted promise evaluation
5: In merge.list(list(...), .opts) :
  restarting interrupted promise evaluation

I'm using the code below to download MODIS titles.

setwd('C:/modis')
library(raster)
library(MODIS)
library(rts)
library(RCurl)

x = 'MOD14A1'

ModisDownload(x = x,h = c(17,18),v = c(4,5),
  dates = '2011.05.01', mosaic = F, proj = F)

The example for this code is also coming from this website: http://r-gis.net/?q=ModisDownload.

Answer 1

The problem might be your NASA authentication. The ModisDownload function is part of the rts package, whose last version (not on CRAN yet, as far as I know) is updated to allow for the necessary login in the NASA server before searching/downloading MODIS image. Try

devtools::install_github('babaknaimi/rts')  # must install the latest one
library(rts)

setNASAauth("yourNASAlogin", "yourNASApassword", update = T) # authenticates at NASA's server
> username and password are successfully updated...!

Trying your code above after login in successfully found and downloaded the MODIS files you were interested in the raw .hdr format. If you are interested in having them as a geotiff, you should install the Modis Download Tool (MRT) and use ModisDowload() to download, mosaic and reproject together the tiles you want.