Providing Remote Sensed Ocean Color Data to Vaccess

摘要

Virginia Access (Vaccess) is an applications research project for providing data, analysis tools and information for Commonwealth of Virginia regional environmental applications needs, which is a collaboration of George Mason University and several other Commonwealth of Virginia educational institutes. One of the VAccess’s functions is to provide regional high-resolution remote sensed ocean color data to its user community for doing Virginia coastal environmental research. rnThe ocean color data are available at GSFC Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC) from several different instruments, including Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) [1], the Coastal Zone Color Scanner (CZCS), and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS Terra and MODIS Aqua). The measured original resolutions are 1-km at the nadir from above instruments. The standard grid products are Level 3 mapped data with resolution of 9km from SeaWiFS and CZCS, 4 km and 9km from MODIS. For regional study purpose, it would be ideal to have the data with higher resolution. However, the archived high-resolution data is swath type data in either HDF or HDF-EOS data format. This has caused difficulties to conduct a regional study. In order to resolve this problem, we are developing an automated data processing system. This system extracts subset from the original swath data file, maps data onto a desired common projection, and merges data within an interested area. The output data file can be imported easily into the Geographic Information System (GIS). The system was created for generating region data for US Virginia costal region. However, it can be configured to generate projected regional data for any desired area.