A land-surface testbed for EOSDIS

We propose to develop an on-line data distribution and interactive display system for the collection, archival, distribution and analysis of operational weather satellite data for applications in land surface studies. A 1,000 sq km scene of the western U.S. (centered on the Colorado Rockies) will be extracted from Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) imagery collected from morning and afternoon passes of the NOAA polar-orbiters at the direct readout stations operated by CU/CCAR. All five channels of these AVHRR data will be navigated and map registered at CU/CCAR and then be transferred to NCAR for storage in an on-line data system. Software will also be available at NCAR to process and navigate the raw AVHRR data as needed. A display workstation software, based on a Macintosh II computer, will be developed that will display and further process the AVHRR data for studies of vegetation monitoring and snowpack assessment. Various options of presently used techniques for both vegetation and snowpack monitoring will be implemented in the workstation software to provide the individual investigator with the freedom to interact with the satellite image data. The display software will be freely distributed online to interested investigators and the AVHRR data will be made available on-line to anyone interested. In addition, potential users will be sought out and connected to the on-line data archive. This experiment with an active on-line archive and interactive analysis systems will provide experience with a small scale EOSDIS.