ASTER Higher-Level Data Products; Applications & Algorithm Description

The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and ReflectionRadiometer (ASTER) is one of 5 instruments aboard the Terra platformthat was launched in December, 1999. ASTER was built by aconsortium of Japanese government, industry, and research groups. Ithas three spectral bands in the visible near-infrared (VNIR), six bandsin the short-wave infrared (SWIR), and five bands in the thermalinfrared (TIR) regions. The ASTER instrument is unique in tworespects: one, it provides multispectral thermal infrared data of highspatial resolution, and also the highest spatial resolution surface spectralreflectance, temperature and emissivity data of all the Terra instrumentsensor systems; and two, because of its limited duty cycle, data areacquired to fulfill on-demand data acquisition requests. The ASTERdata products include relative spectral reflectance and emissivity,surface radiance, temperature, reflectance and emissivity, brightnesstemperature-at-sensor, and digital elevation models. ASTER data areexpected to contribute to a wide array of application areas including,geology and soils, vegetation and ecosystem dynamics, hazardsmonitoring (volcanoes, wildfires, floods, landslides, and coastalerosion), land surface climatology, hydrology, and land cover change.

Keywords:

ASTER data products , Applications & Algorithm Description