An automatic system for AVHRR land surface product generation

Abstract

Making products from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) on board the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) polar‐orbiting satellites can be time consuming and an automated technique for image processing is required to generate long time series of AVHRR imagery. This paper aims to describe the development of a system for fully‐automated AVHRR image processing, including radiometric calibration, precise geo‐registration and generating land‐surface products, such as vegetation indices, maximum value composites and cloud masks. Tests for crop monitoring purposes were carried out using High Resolution Picture Transmission (HRPT) images between October 2003 and April 2004. The region used to evaluate the system was the State of Paraná, one of the primary soybean producers in Brazil. Results have shown that for severely cloud‐filtered images, the system was effective in generating geometrically precise image products, with geolocation errors less than a pixel. The developed system can be operated with no human intervention and can be used as an important tool for NOAA‐AVHRR image users especially those who need to use long time series.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the College of Agricultural Engineering (State University of Campinas) for the technical support provided by the Geoprocessing Laboratory. The development of the MCC AVHRR image navigation software was carried out under funding from NASA's Earth Sciences Enterprise as part of its Physical Oceanography and Altimetry program. Special appreciation goes to Eric Lindstrom, the program manager, for continued support of this research.