Long-term Australian Daytime AVHRR - NOAA and Earth Observation Satellite, Australasian Coverage

The Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) and AVHRR/3 sensors have been carried on the US NOAA polar orbiting satellites since the 1980s. These data have been acquired via direct reception from the satellite by reception stations located in Australia. CSIRO has stitched together data received by different stations and agencies to compile a national high quality data set. The daylight satellite overpasses have been extracted from this data set for each day in the 30 year period commencing 1 April 1992. The data have been geolocated, and calibrated to produce imagery channels of solar reflectance and brightness temperature using community published methods. Satellite view and sun illumination angles for each pixel are provided, together with a preliminary cloud mask based on the CLAVR algorithm. The spatial resolution is ~1 km and temporal coverage is daily. The reprojected data set (in EPSG:4326, lon-lat) is available via the CSIRO EASI hub.

Credit
We at TERN acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians throughout Australia, New Zealand and all nations. We honour their profound connections to land, water, biodiversity and culture and pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
This work was funded by the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN), while compilation of the underlying raw data set has been supported by CSIRO and the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS). TERN and IMOS are Australian Government NCRIS enabled projects, and are supported by the use of TERN and IMOS infrastructure.

Purpose
The brightness temperature data are usable for sea and land surface temperature monitoring, while the reflectance imagery enable vegetation and surface cover detection and quantification. Cloud properties can also be deduced from these data.

Data Processing
The original data set is held in ASDA (Australian Satellite Data Archive) format by CSIRO. The processing codes have been developed in Python at CSIRO, building on CSIRO's CAPS (Common AVHRR Processing System) software and the Pygac packages. The bulk of the processing was undertaken at the NCI (National Computational Infrastructure) in Canberra.

Data Usage
Provides ~1 km resolution daily coverage of top of atmosphere reflectance and brightness temperature for the greater Australasian region. The data are suitable for applications requiring moderate resolution (~1 km) daily coverage, that are not sensitive to atmospheric correction.