AVHRR Long Term Data Preservation (LTDP)

The main objective of ESA’s proposed Long Term Data Preservation (LTDP) initiative is to guarantee long-term preservation of Earth Observation data from ESA, their member states’, and third party missions managed by ESA. These activities of the joint and cooperative approach shall ensure the data's accessibility and usability.
The importance of Earth Observation data preservation has been expressed by practically all environmental monitoring programmes and has recently been emphasised by the Climate Change Initiative. A strong demand for a homogenous data set over the most recent 30 years and with a European coverage as minimum extent has been pointed out by different user groups. The Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR), carried on-board NOAA and EUMETSAT MetOp satellites, is the only system which provides daily global data at a medium spatial resolution over the last three decades. The AVHRR sensor’s configuration has been almost unchanged over the sensor’s life time.

The University of Bern (Switzerland) has been receiving and archiving AVHRR data since many years covering whole Europe. The archive ranges from 1989 until 2016 including only few data gaps caused by problems of the receiving antenna. However, additional data exist at ESA facilities and other centers to fill these temporal and spatial gaps. Of particular interest are data from 1981 to 1989 to expand the time series to the past. Besides these gaps a unique data record has been compiled at the University of Bern. A consolidation is needed due to the fact that the available AVHRR data set archived at the University of Bern, ESA and at other local archives cover different regions and times. Hence, the final aim of the AVHRR curation project is to provide a public accessible AVHRR data set covering Europe for more than 30 years. Further details about ESA's LTDP project and the partners can be found here (see ESA’s LTDP Framework).

Further material:

AVHRR Curation Project Description (PDF, 247KB)