Abstract: To examine the differences between the albedos separately derived with the full inversion (FI) and the magnitude inversion (MI) over large area, a couple of contrastive inversion experiments were conducted with the Terra MODIS data of years 2002-2004 over China to achieve two different kinds of MODIS albedos under the same temporal and spatial circumstances. The statistical analyses revealed that: The absolute biases between the FI and MI albedos, including the black-sky albedo (BSA) and the white sky-albedo (WSA), were all less than 0.05 for the MODIS bands 1-7 and the three broad bands, i.e. the visible (VIS), the near infrared (NIR) and the shortwave (SW), and the absolute biases for BSA were distinctly less than those for WSA; the differences between the FI and MI albedos derived at infrared bands were larger than those derived at visible bands; the differences between the FI and MI albedos in summer were the largest among four seasons, while those in autumn were the smallest.