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Description:
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Over the years since the launch of the first of the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometers (AVHRRs) in 1978, the data from these instruments have come to be used for a very wide range of non-meteorological applications for which their use was never envisaged.
In this book Professor Arthur Cracknell describes the satellite system, as well as the instrument itself, the control of the spacecraft and the data-recovery arrangements, both by NOAA and also by the enormous number of local user ground stations which have now been built all over the world. The book also covers various aspects of the processing of the data to extract useful environmental information. The applications of the data to marine problems, based primarly on the study of sea-surface temperatures from the thermal-infrared channels of the instrument, are considered, as well as the study of vegetation and a whole variety of other land-based and hydrological applications. Some of these applications are operational, some of them have been demonstrated to be feasible but, for one reason or another, are not actually in operational use and some applications are frankly speculative. The amazing thing about AVHRR is that its present popularity far exceeds anything that could have been envisaged when the instrument was first designed.
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