AVHRR
Google Earth Imagery
About this imagery
This website displays pseudo ‘true-color’ images generated with data from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Very_High_Resolution_Radiometer); since the satellites we use only measure radiation in a few narrow bands, we cannot exactly reproduce images that are equivalent to what our eyes perceive. Therefore, we have used the available information to create a representation of how the Earth would look from space.
Currently we process and display data from AVHRR instruments onboard the NOAA POES (http://www.oso.noaa.gov/poes/) and EUMETSAT METEOSAT (http://www.eumetsat.int/Home/index.htm) series of polar orbiting satellites.
The Keyhole Markup Language (KML) (http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/kml_tags_beta1.html) files we generate are for the freely available Google Earth application (http://earth.google.com/). To view the imagery you can either download the KML file for the day to you computer and open it with Google Earth, or open Google Earth on your computer and paste the web link to the KML file into your ‘open file’ prompt.
To learn more about the satellite we use for these images, please see the wikipedia entry for the AVHRR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Very_High_Resolution_Radiometer).
Information about the algorithms used to process the AVHRR data and methods to obtain the AVHRR product files can be found at the Clouds from AVHRR Extended (CLAVR-x) homepage (http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/clavr/).