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Spatial Extent: Global and the Amazon region of South America
Spatial Resolution: 0.5 degree gridded (global); 0.1 degree gridded (Amazon)
Temporal Characteristics:  

Date Classes Represented:

Time Series

Time Steps Available:

monthly

Dates represented:

August 1981 - July 1994

Data used by the authors in this study include data produced through funding from the Earth Observing System Pathfinder Program of NASA's Mission to Planet Earth in cooperation with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The data were provided by the Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS), Distributed Active Archive Center at Goddard Space Flight Center which archives, manages, and distributes this data set.

The Goddard Space Flight Center DAAC should be credited in any publications using this data set.

Please acknowledge the University of New Hampshire, EOS-WEBSTER Earth Science Information Partner (ESIP) as the data distributor for this dataset.

 

Summary:

Two land surface data sets from the NOAA/NASA AVHRR (Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer) Pathfinder Project on the NOAA/TIROS operational meteorological satellites are available on EOS-WEBSTER:

1. The Amazon 0.1 degree data set on EOS-WEBSTER is a monthly maximum recomposite value of NDVI data from the Pathfinder Composite Data Set reprojected to 0.1 degree for the Amazon region. The temporal scale is from August 1981 through July 1994.

2. The Global 0.5 degree data set on EOS-WEBSTER is a monthly maximum recomposite value of NDVI data from the Pathfinder Composite Data Set reprojected to 0.5 degree for terrestrial and climate modeling applications. The data span from August 1981 through July 1994.

Both data sets are derived from the Pathfinder Composite Data Set which in turn is derived from the Pathfinder Daily Data Set. The Pathfinder Composite Data Set is generated by comparing the NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) values for each 8 km bin from 10 consecutive Daily Data Sets. The pixel with the highest NDVI for the 10 days is chosen as the date for inclusion in the composite. This compositing process is effective for removing most of the clouds and atmospheric contaminants, thus providing as close to a cloud free field in each of the data layers as is possible [Holben (1986) International Journal of Remote Sensing, 7:1417–1434]. There are three composites per month for each year of data. The first composite of each month is for days 1 to 10, the second composite is for days 11 to 20, and the third composite is for the remaining days.

For a full discussion of the NOAA/NASA Pathfinder AVHRR Land Data Sets please consult the Goddard DAAC Pathfinder Data Guide or the AVHRR User's Guide (available in PDF format).

 

Data Providers:

Rob Braswell and Steve Hagen, Complex Systems Research Center, Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space, Morse Hall, University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire, USA. Ph: 603.862.1792, Fax: 603.862.0188, Email: hagen@eos.sr.unh.edu.

 

Last Data Update:

3/27/2000

Last Doc. Updated:

2/07/2005

Doc. Updated By:

Denise Blaha

 

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