Members from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Patterns in the Landscape - Analyses of Cause and Effect (PLACE) team are releasing monthly surface water maps for the conterminous United States (U.S.) from 2003 through 2019 as 250-meter resolution geoTIFF files. The maps were produced using the Dynamic Surface Water Extent (DSWE) algorithm applied to daily Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) imagery (DSWEmod) (Soulard et al., 2021) - see associated items. The DSWEmod model classifies the landscape (i.e., each MODIS pixel) into different classes of surface water based on quantified levels of confidence, including, i) high-confidence surface water (class 1), ii) moderate-confidence surface water (class 2), iii) potential wetland (class 3), and iv) low-confidence water/wetland (class 4), as well as a not-water class (class 0) and a no-data class (class 9). This Child Item includes the monthly DSWEmod surface water maps for 2008. The image contains 12 bands, where each band represents a month from January (Band 1) to December (Band 12). The Parent Directory for this data release consists of a zipped folder which contains the monthly DSWEmod surface water maps from 2003 through 2019. There are 17 multi-band images within the zipped folder, equating to one image for each year from 2003 through 2019. Similar to this Child Item, each image consists of 12 bands, where each band value from 1-12 represents sequential months from January (Band 1) to December (Band 12). Each Child Item consists of a single year of DSWEmod surface water maps (e.g., DSWEmod_YearlyImages_2015) to allow for the user to download specific years rather than the full collection of DSWEmod data.