Imagery
The ESL's unique location and capabilities allows it to observe the earth
in a variety of ways with surveillance of the Gulf of Mexico being our primary
activity. We are equipped for numerous atmospheric views, investigation of
ocean applications, and we produce
True Color
images from a few
spacecraft.
Below are links to several pages for the various
telemetries
we capture from a variety of satellites.
Many images are produced on a daily (or nearly so) schedule. These images are
collected into image archives
that you may browse through a calendar-based interface.
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Terra and Aqua Satellite Imagery
MODIS
is a key instrument aboard the Terra-1 (EOS AM) and Aqua-1 (EOS PM)
satellites which provides high radiometric sensitivity (12 bit)
imagery in 36 spectral bands ranging in wavelength
from 0.4 to 14.4 micrometer. Two bands are imaged at a nominal
resolution of 250 m at nadir, with five bands at
500 m and the remaining 29 bands at 1,000 m. Shown above is
an Aqua MODIS true color RGB image obtained during
Hurricane Ivan.
NOAA POES Satellite Imagery
From its central location, the Earth Scan Lab captures NOAA Polar data
from the entire Gulf of Mexico, most of the western Atlantic, the extreme
eastern Pacific, the northern Caribbean, and the landmass from Hudson Bay
to northernmost South America. Several passes of the data accumulated
daily in the ESL archive create a permanent growing record of
environmental data for education, research, economic, and forensic
applications.
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GOES Satellite Imagery
A number of
real-time GOES atmosphere products
are generated for Gulf of Mexico by the ESL. These are divided into
different
regions with emphasis on the Atlantic Ocean View, Gulf of Mexico,
the Tropics and the
North Hemisphere. The GOES imagery is also used to produce
night-time composite SST imagery.
Oceansat Chlorophyll-a Imagery
The Louisiana coast receives large volumes of river water from the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers. The rivers usually
flood in spring and sometimes into summer, producing a stratified water column. The river-borne nutrients fuel large
phytoplankton blooms on the shelf. These physical and biological processes can result in hypoxia on the shelf, commonly referred to as the "dead zone".
more...
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