A Comparison Of Avhrr Gac And Hrpt Data For Regional Environmental Monitoring

monitoring. At the Institute for Remote Sensing Applications the analysis of vegetation dynamics is applied to the monitoring of renewable natural resources in Africa. Current topics are crop production. vegetation change in major river basins and degradation of the savanna tropical forest ecosystem. Multispectral data from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (A VHRR) sensor on the NOAA series of satellites operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are used extensively in this work. AVHRR data are available in full resolution (lKm) and reduced resolution (4 Km) formats. For the African continent the reduced resolution Global Area Coverage (GAC) data archive offers more complete coverage (both arealJy and temporally) than is available from full resolution data archives. There is near daily coverage of the entire continent at 4km resolution. or limited coverage at lkm resolution. The aim of this work is to establish the value of the low spatial resolution data through comparison with full resolution data sets.