NOAA AVHRR data processing: requirements and limitations in operational algorithms

NOAA AVHRR data are now widely used in many applications, where the required precision is clearly higher than the required by the original meteorological applications. Three main steps can be considered in the development of a data processing scheme for AVHRR data: radiometric calibration, geometric processing and reflectance/temperature retrieval through atmospheric/radiometric corrections, including also cloud screening and the elaboration of a database to work with temporal series of data through multitemporal composites. A complete AVHRR data processing algorithm is presented. Some considerations about data processing techniques to meet the precision requirements of advanced applications, in which quantitative analysis require accurate and validated data, are also discussed