Coastal upwellings are common in the Great Lakes but have lacked enumeration and systematic classification of spatial extent, frequency, duration, and magnitude. Near real-time sea surface temperature (SST) images derived from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) provide indices of upwelling events, but visual inspection of daily images can be tedious. Moreover, the definition o...

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 o...

The assessment of water body dynamics is not only in itself a topic of strong demand, but the presence of water bodies is important information when it comes to the derivation of products such as land surface temperature, leaf area index, or snow/ice cover mapping from satellite data. For the TIMELINE project, which aims to derive such products for a long time series of Advanced Very High Resol...

Remote sensing can provide estimates of spatially distributed actual evapotranspiration (ET) at different spatial scales. Methods that combine remotely sensed observations with other ground-based information on land and atmospheric properties usually allow improved estimates of spatially distributed evapotranspiration (ET) than when remotely sensed data are used alone. Spatial resolution of rem...

The impact of very deep convection on the water budget and thermal structure of the tropical tropopause layer is still not well quantified, not least because of limitations imposed by the available observation techniques. Here, we present detailed analysis of the climatology of the cloud top brightness temperatures as indicators of deep convection during the Indian summer monsoon, and the varia...

Long-term global datasets of the Leaf Area Index (LAI) are important for monitoring global vegetation dynamics and are an important input for Earth system models (ESM). The comparison of long-term datasets is based on two recently available datasets both derived from AVHRR (Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer) time series. The LAI3g dataset is developed from the new improved third generati...

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-...

[1] Snow cover strongly interacts with climate through snow albedo feedbacks. However, global climate models still are not adequate in representing snow cover fraction (SCF), i.e., the fraction of a model grid cell covered by snow. Through an analysis of the advanced very high resolution radiometer (AVHRR) derived SCF and the Canadian Meteorological Centre (CMC) gridded snow depth and snow wate...

Accurately modeling the land surface phenology based on satellite data is very important to the study of vegetation ecological dynamics and the related ecosystem process. In this study, we developed a Sigmoid curve (S-curve) function by integrating an asymmetric Gaussian function and a logistic function to fit the leaf area index (LAI) curve. We applied the resulting asymptotic lines and the cu...

This paper on reports the production of a 1 km spatial resolution land cover classiŽ cation using data for 1992–1993 from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR). This map will be included as an at-launch product of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) to serve as an input for several algorithms requiring knowledge of land cover type. The methodology was derive...