Automating the TeraScan Image Process for Creation of NOAA AVHRR Data Products

During the summer of 2002 the Center of Excellence in Remote Sensing Education and Research (CERSER) was established on the campus of Elizabeth City State University. It is the intent of CERSER to develop innovative and relevant research collaboration focused on coastal, ocean, and marine research. The project represents a joint effort by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the MU-SPIN Office of Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and SeaSpace. In addition to providing remotely sensed Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) and Sea Wide Field-of-View Sensor (SeaWiFS) data for research projects during the summer and academic year, CERSER maintains a website which displays and archives data that has been captured and processed. Since the establishment of the CERSER lab, data has been processed, annotated and converted into tiff files manually by using a series of TeraScan and LINIX commands. This process is time consuming and requires a person to physically be at the TeraScan Machine. The objective of this project was to automate the process of creating NOAA AVHRR products. The TeraScan Product Generation System was utilized to create a visible and sea surface temperature image. This was accomplished by first creating a ‘master’ of North Carolina and Virginia. A ‘master’ is a TeraScan dataset that delimits a geographical area of the earth and specifies a map projection and a pixel resolution to the area. The ‘master’ was used for the sea surface temperature product. Visible images were processed from the complete raw AVHRR data. A script was also created which would process raw AVHRR data from the passdisk. A script is a sequence of commands linked together to automatically run when initiated. A script can be initiated by running it from the command line or by linking the processing to TeraCapCon (TeraScan Capture Control). Once passes are captured on the passdisk the script processes the image and generates a picture product. Each image, overlaid with a coastal boundary, gridlines, a wedge and a legend, is converted into a tagged image file format (tiff) file and automatically distributed to the server using file transfer protocol (ftp). Automating the image process eliminates the need for an individual to manually process images, and insures that the CERSER webpage is current.