Automating the TeraScan Image
Process for Creation of NOAA AVHRR Data Products
Karitsa Williams, Ly Tesha Bass, Mentor: Mrs. Keisha
Wilkins
Full Report (PDF)
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 created which processes 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.
