Nearshore Thermal Habitat and General Circulation Mapping in Arctic Alaskan Coasts Using Archived AVHRR Images
Abstract
At the University of Alaska Fairbanks a continuous archive of images from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) onboard the series of NOAA satellites is now available starting from 1993 through 2008 for large parts of the circum Arctic north. The largest temporal coverage available is for the Alaskan Arctic coasts and includes over 40000 images for the summer months. The broader objective of our study is to use this wealth of available data for mapping general sea surface temperatures and monitoring trends in changes in the sea surface temperatures in the last 15 years in the Alaskan Arctic Coastal regions. A second objective of our study is to look at near shore circulation patterns, and investigate how changes in the landcover of the adjacent lands affect the nearshore circulation patterns. This information is fundamentally important to understand and predict the dynamics of the shallow coastal habitats that in turn influence the distribution and condition of the fish populations. From the AVHRR archive we extracted all images from the months of July, August and September that covered at least 60 percent of the Arctic Alaskan coastal areas. The images that were in sensor projection were converted to map projection using the coastal boundary vector layer as a guideline for manually selecting tie points to correct for the geometry. Starting from the oldest images in our archive from 1993 we processed over 2000 AVHRR scenes which were then used to generate sea surface temperature images and NDVI images and a time series animation of changing patterns of NDVI. The prototype animation generated to demonstrate the landcover and coastal region dynamics will be further extended to cover the entire time span from 1993 through 2008.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2008
- Bibcode:
- 2008AGUFMOS11D1166P
- Keywords:
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- 3319 General circulation (1223);
- 4217 Coastal processes;
- 4954 Sea surface temperature;
- 5464 Remote sensing