The Australian Great Barrier Reef (GBR) experienced its most intensive and extensive coral bleaching event on record in early 1998 [1]. This period also saw extensive damage to other reefs around the globe. There is concern among environmental scientists and GBR-based industries, especially tourism, that widespread death and bleaching of corals caused by extremely high temperatures during 1997-...

This article presents a method for realtime mapping of algal blooms in turbid coastal waters using the remote sensing reflectance of red band (Channel 1, 580-680 nm) and near-infrared band (Channel 2, 720-1100 nm) of the AVHRR sensor on the NOAA series satellites. A turbidity-free function for near-infrared and red signals, α0 = (bb/bb)(a/ a) based on the first order bb/(a+bb) model deducing eq...

Global snow cover forms the largest and most transient part of cryosphere in terms area. On local regional scale, small changes can have drastic effects such as floods droughts, on global scale is planetary albedo. Daily imagery basis long-term observation analysis, only optical sensors offer necessary spatial temporal resolution to address decadal developments impact climate change availabilit...

(A)ATSR sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are already being used on a regular basis as a reference source against which to bias-correct SST observations from other satellites. In this paper, we take a different approach and explore the use of the (A)ATSR thermal infrared radiances themselves as a reference against which to compare radiance data from NOAA operational satellites. The known high acc...

The distinct contrast between the reflectance of solar radiation in Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) channel 3 (3.75 mm) by clouds and by bright surfaces provides an effective means of cloud discrimination over snow/ice surfaces. A threshold function for the top-of-atmosphere (TOA) albedo in channel 3 (r3) is derived and used to develop an improved method for cloud discriminatio...

This paper assesses the effect of changes in solar zenith angle (SZA) and sensor changes on reflectances in channel 1, channel 2, and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) from the advanced very high resolution radiometer (AVHRR) Pathfinder land data set for the period July 1981 through September 1994. First, the effect of changes in SZA on channel reflectances and NDVI is derived from ...

This study evaluates the ability to track grassland growth phenology in the Swiss Alps with NOAA-16 Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) time series. Three growth parameters from 15 alpine and subalpine grassland sites were investigated between 2001 and 2005: Melt-Out (MO), Start Of Growth (SOG), and End Of Growth (EOG).We tried to estim...

The present 2 generation aerosol retrieval algorithm over oceans at NOAA/NESDIS separately retrieves two values of aerosol optical depth, 1 and 2, from AVHRR channels 1 and 2 centered at 1=0.63 (operational) and 2=0.83 μm (experimental), respectively. From these, an effective Angstrom exponent, , related to particle size, can be derived as =-ln( 1/ 2)/ln( 1/ 2). The single-channel look-up-table...