Improvements in Access to ASTER Data: Increasing the User Community
Abstract
The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER), on NASA's Terra satellite platform, is a collaborative project between Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, and US NASA. From its inception, ASTER data were expected to serve an established scientific user base, accustomed to similar data sets from Landsat and other multi-spectral imagers. While that community continues to be served, novel data products and acquisition approaches have increased the user base in several ways.
Inspired by work with a variety of conservation organizations around the world, many with severe budgetary constraints, the TerraLook project was developed. This provided free tools and data that could be used on inexpensive hardware by local park managers and conservationists with no prior satellite data experience. Encroachment and land use changes over time could easily be studied and communicated to decision makers. A mosaicked, global map of ASTER radiances was planned from the start, but as ASTER's Digital Elevation Model (DEM) production capability improved, and the archive of VNIR data accumulated, a Global DEM dataset was created and released as a free product to the global community. It is the most distributed of all ASTER products and has improved the quality of cartography in many developing countries. Other uses include visualization of earth data for scientific, commercial, educational and entertainment use. Other new global or regional data products developed include the Global Emissivity Database (GED), mineral maps and a night-time thermal infrared map of arid regions around the world. Downlink bandwidth limits, and ASTER's high data volume, required the use of a scheduling system for image acquisition planning. A process for urgent scheduling/acquisition was developed for natural disaster response. This capability has been extensively used, and spawned the ASTER Emergency Scheduling Interface and Control System (AESICS) which has been instrumental in capturing volcanic activity in high resolution after lower resolution satellites detect thermal anomalies. These, and more applications and examples, will be presented. Work by Abrams, Eng and Geller was done at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract to NASA.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMIN13A..01E
- Keywords:
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- 1640 Remote sensing;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1912 Data management;
- preservation;
- rescue;
- INFORMATICS;
- 1916 Data and information discovery;
- INFORMATICS;
- 1976 Software tools and services;
- INFORMATICS