NOAA GVI GUIDE Section 1.0

Introduction Page, GVI Guide TOC, Acronyms
Previous Section, Next Section

---

1.0 Introduction

This User's Guide describes the Global Vegetation Index (GVI) Product that is archived by the Satellite Services Branch (SSB), formerly Satellite Data Services Division (SDSD), of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) under the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS). It includes descriptions of the current Second Generation version of the product (with the Calibrated Vegetation Index) produced from April 1985 to the present, in addition to the earlier First Generation version produced from May 1982 through March 1985.

NOAA/NESDIS's Office of Research and Applications (ORA) Climate Research and Applications Division (CRAD) Land Surface Team has recently developed a Third Generation version of the GVI for data from April 1985 to the present. The Third Generation is a tremendous improvement over the Second Generation with enhancements which include consistent post-launch calibration of AVHRR Channels 1 and 2, non-linearity corrections for Channels 4 and 5; and generation of quality/cloud data for each map cell. At present, it is routinely produced at ORA and transferred electronically to SSB.

In addition, a new Global Vegetation Index (GVI) data set has been developed by the Land Surface Team which is called the Continental Weekly Composite data set. This data set contains more than six years of GVI data which have been composited on a weekly basis by continent. Section 4.4.5 describes this new data set.

This guide contains a section describing the vegetation index itself, descriptions of the three generations of GVI products, and information on how they may be ordered from SSB.

This document and its updates can be found on the Internet at the following URL: http://www2.ncdc.noaa.gov/docs/. Also, the document is available in both WordPerfect 6.1 and Postscript files for downloading through ftp at: ftp2.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/doc/vegguide/.