Near-real time satellite products to drive land surface monitoring and modelling
The Bureau of Meteorology continuously acquires low resolution multispectral image data, with continental coverage of Australia in near-real time, from both AVHRR on the NOAA polar orbiting satellites and from the geostationary imagers on Japan's MTSAT-1R and China's FY-2C satellites. The Bureau routinely derives several products from these satellites that can serve as continuous data streams that can contribute to operational land surface monitoring, either directly or as inputs (drivers or constraints) to land surface models.
Solar radiation, in the form of fields of integrated daily solar horizontal exposure, are produced daily from MTSAT-1R visible-band data. A 15-year climatology of daily solar radiation has recently been produced by processing archived satellite data from 1990 to 2004, and will find application in agriculture, solar energy planning, building design, and surface energy balance studies.
The Bureau has implemented operational production of NDVI from AVHRR data using the CAPS software developed by CSIRO, for use in applications that require national monitoring of vegetation condition. A Grassland Curing Index (GCI, a modified NDVI) is also produced for operational use in fire danger assessment and fire management planning.
These solar radiation and NDVI data streams, as well as land surface temperature and albedo derived from AVHRR data, can serve as near-real time continental inputs to systems for the assessment of surface moisture status across Australia, based either on simple surface energy balance models or more complex land surface models.