Current art uses metadata associated with satellite images to facilitate their retrieval from image repositories. Typical metadata are geographic location, time, and data type. Because the metadata do not indicate which regions within an image are obscured by clouds, retrieval with such metadata may produce an image within which the region of interest (ROI) for the user is not visible. We repor...

More than a hundred ERS SAR images were analyzed to investigate the features of wind regime and surface circulation in the Japan Sea during the winter monsoon season. Most of the images cover the northwestern portion of the sea. 35 of them were eliminated from the analysis due to strong winds. Background radar characteristics on the rest images varied from practically uniform when the marine bo...

Drought is one of the major natural calamities causing important damages to natural vegetation, agriculture and the society. The climate changes scenarios forecast the increase and intensification of extreme phenomena all over the globe. Romania is one of the most vulnerable countries, and has 7 million hectares located within areas affected by the risk of desertification. An integrated system ...

Title of Dissertation: MAPPING PHOTOSYNTHETICALLY ACTIVE RADIATION (PAR) USING MULTIPLE REMOTE SENSING DATA Tao Zheng, Doctor of Philosophy, 2007 Dissertation directed by: Dr. Shunlin Liang, Professor Department of Geography Incident Photosynthetically Active Radiation (PAR) is an important parameter for terrestrial ecosystem models. Presently, deriving PAR using remotely sensed data is the onl...

[1] The February 2001 eruption of Cleveland Volcano, Alaska allowed for comparisons of volcanic ash detection using two-band thermal infrared (10–12 mm) remote sensing from MODIS, AVHRR, and GOES 10. Results show that high latitude GOES volcanic cloud sensing the range of about 50 to 65 N is significantly enhanced. For the Cleveland volcanic clouds the MODIS and AVHRR data have zenith angles 6–...

Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) instrument are used to provide the mean July and January global daytime distributions of multilayer cloud, where multilayer cloud is defined as cirrus overlapping one or more lower layers. The AVHRR data was taken from multiple years that were chosen to provide data with a const...

Visual cloud reports from land and ocean regions of the Arctic are analyzed for total cloud cover. Trends and interannual variations in surface cloud data are compared to those obtained from Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) and Television and Infrared Observation Satellite (TIROS) Operational Vertical Sounder (TOVS) satellite data. Over the Arctic as a whole, trends and interann...

Satellite-based temperature measurements are an important indicator for global climate change studies over large areas. Records from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) and (Advanced) Along Track Scanning Radiometer ((A)ATSR) are providing long-term time series information. Assessing the quality of remote sensing-based temperat...

Recently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) performed sea surface temperature (SST) reanalysis (RAN1) from seven AVHRR/3s onboard NOAA-15 to -19 and Metop-A and -B, from 2002–present. Operational L1b data were used as input. The time series of clear-sky ocean brightness temperatures (BTs) and derived SSTs were found to be unstable. The SSTs were empirically stabilized a...