Case Study
AVHRR Data
The Institute for Computational Earth System Science (ICESS), a UCSB research center, maintains a TeraScan ground station capable of receiving High-Resolution Picture Transmission (HRPT) image telemetry from the Advanced Very-High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensors on board the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) polar-orbiting satellites. Each AVHRR sensor continuously images a 2000 km swath of the Earth's surface, in 5 spectral channels (visible, near-infrared, and thermal), at a spatial resolution of 1 km. (An in-depth description of AVHRR data is available at the USGS EROS Data Center site on AVHRR.) We acquire both the day and night swaths over the western United States and eastern Pacific Ocean from the NOAA-12 and NOAA-14 satellites.
We currently provide several UCSB research groups and others, including Regional Earth Science Application Centers (RESACs), with a variety of custom, interim AVHRR products. These interim products are then used by scientists to generate other related products for their own use. The AVHRR HRPT telemetry typically undergoes several processing steps, including navigation, calibration and registration, to produce the interim AVHRR products we provide to others.
The ESSW project has developed web-based front ends for custom product generation of the AVHRR data acquired at UCSB. We use the ESSW Lab Notebook database to create an archive of the navigated, full AVHRR swaths we have acquired over time. We use the ESSW Lab Notebook to track automated, generic AVHRR processing. We provide automated, custom AVHRR product generation via the Web through a combination of specified product profiles and our archive of AVHRR swaths.
