PAL Data on FTP

Welcome to the NOAA/NASA Pathfinder 8-km AVHRR Land, NDVI Continental Subsets CD set. This CD-ROM contains the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) for Africa and Europe. It is part of a three CD set, with the other two CD's containing continental subsets of North America, South America, Asia and Australia. The data covers the period from July 13, 1981 through December 31, 1999, at a nominal 10-day temporal resolution, and has been spatially subsetted from the NOAA/NASA Pathfinder 8-km AVHRR Land global data set. The CD-ROM also contains browse images of the continental subsets.

For additional information on NDVI data read the PAL NDVI Readme.

Africa 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999
Europe 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999
Ancillary data Africa, Europe

Software Decompression

The AVHRR instrument, or Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer, is a NOAA instrument flown onboard their Polar Orbiting Satellite series. There are currently close to twenty years of this data, making it one of the longest continually, collected satellite data sets available.

The Pathfinder Program initiated by NOAA and NASA, produces long-term data sets processed in a consistent manner for global change research. Pathfinder AVHRR Land data sets are terrestrial data sets produced from more than 18 years of archived data from the five-channel AVHRR sensor aboard the "afternoon" NOAA satellites, namely NOAA-7, -9, -11, and 14. AVHRR has five channels, one visible, one reflective near-infrared, one middle infrared, and two thermal channels.

Data on this CD-ROM consists of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) values at 8-km resolution, derived from the visible and the reflective near-infrared channel reflectances. The NDVI parameter is highly correlated to surface vegetation.

If you would like to learning more about NOAA/NASA Pathfinder AVHRR Land data set read the User Guide, or connect to the Global Land Biosphere site at the Goddard Earth Sciences, Distributed Active Archive Center (GES-DAAC).

Acknowledgements

This CD set was produced as part of the NOAA/NASA Pathfinder AVHRR Land (PAL) program. The CD set is made available by the GES DAAC, which is part of the Global Change Data Center's (GCDC), Data and Information Services Center (DISC). Support for the production of the CD set was given by the Center for Earth Observation and Space Research (CEOSR), at George Mason University's, School for Computational Sciences (SCS), as part of the Seasonal to Inter-annual Earth Science Information Partner (SIESIP) effort.

The editors of the CD set would like to thank John Grogard, Virginia Heilman, Jennifer Mahoney, Bob Rank and Tong Zhu for their assistance in making the CD set.

NASA GSFC Goddard DAAC
NASA Goddard GDAAC

Last update:Fri Aug 11 11:10:10 EST 2000
NASA official: Steve Kempler, DAAC Manager -- kempler@daac.gsfc.nasa.gov