GEOSTATIONARY METEOROLOGICAL SATELLITE - IR IMAGERY

CSRSR (National Central University, Taiwan)

Announced availability: 1 July 1994

Data Access

A set of Geostationary Meteorological Satellite (GMS) images for the COARE IOP, collected by the Center for Space and Remote Sensing Research, National Central University, Taiwan, is available upon request from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, NC (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov). In addition, data are archived at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO (http://dss.ucar.edu/pub/toga_coare/).

Background

GMS-4 is a Japanese satellite in geostationary orbit over the equator at approximately 140E. The satellite is equipped with the Visible and Infrared Spin Scan Radiometer (VISSR) imaging sensor, which uses the spin motion of the satellite to scan the earth in the East-West direction. GMS begins a North-South scan every hour on the half hour, with four additional scans daily for wind estimation. At the satellite subpoint, the visible (0.5-0.75 um) channel has a resolution of 1.25 km and the infrared (10.5-12.5 um) channel has a resolution of 5 km. This gives approximately 10,000 visible and 2,500 infrared lines and samples for each full-globe image. The visible channel is digitized at 6 bits and the infrared channel at 8 bits. The S-VISSR telemetry is transmitted digitally at 1.7 GHz with a bit rate of 660 kbps. Detailed documentation on the GMS satellite and the VISSR can be found in the GMS User's Guide.

Data File Information

The data are 5-km resolution, infrared images, centered on 0 N, 140 E. The images are 2291 x 2291 pixels in size. They are contained on 8-mm tape (5.0 GB volume). In addition to the data, two programs are available: latlon.f, which calculates the latitude and longitude of the TOGA COARE area, and gmstmp.f, which converts the digital count to temperature.

For more information, please contact:

Richard Chinman
TOGA COARE International Project Office
1850 Table Mesa Drive
Boulder, CO 80303
USA

email: chinman@ucar.edu
Phone: (303) 497-8696
FAX: (303) 497-8634

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