Before you view the images . . .

Hyperlink windows
This site is set up to display hyperlinks in their own window, which will appear the first time a link is requested. Other hyperlinks will be displayed in the same window. You may want to arrange the main and secondary windows to your liking. This technique allows access to an image and its description at the same time. If you wish to close the secondary window select close from the file menu.

The images presented here are more meaningful if you have some understanding of their nature. See the readme file for important disclaimers and a bit of information on the satellites. Limitations in the techniques are also discussed. Most of the images are presented in the form of maps, that is, they are geographically registered and show latitude and longitude. The About the maps page describes the various maps and what they show.

Some information on the satellites
The satellites used for the images on this site are the NOAA Polar Orbiters (also known as TIROS satellites). NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has a very nice description of the Polar Orbiters. The Canada Centre for Remote Sensing has a very nice web page with details on all the NOAA polar orbiter satellites, from NOAA-1 on to future ones. Weekly updates are available from NOAA.

General information about satellite imagery
Nick Kew and co-authors have put together The Satellite Imagery FAQ which gives a lot of details about this topic and pointers to other webs ites.

History of this site
The value of AVHRR imagery was recognized by our group supervisor, Dr. Gasparovic, and he brought the equipment and software needed to access AVHRR data into the lab. SeaSpace was the source of the computer board and software and I attended a class at their company in La Jolla, CA in Sep 1995. Since then we have built a number of software tools, mostly using the IDL computer language, to let us explore AVHRR data.

The main focus for us is sea surface temperature, but my interest in maps also lead me to use the AVHRR imagery to view landforms and other interesting features.

While collecting interesting views from AVHRR I came across a forest fire in Utah. Being so new to AVHRR I did not realize that such views were quite common and well known. Sometime afterward I was in email contact with Keith Whittle, editor of a number of interesting web pages including the Historical Gazette, Anno Atomi - History of Atomic Tests 1957, and the story of Bill Bires who participated in the atomic test series Buster-Jangle in 1951. Keith was working on the Wallowa County Chieftain, the county newspaper for Wallowa County, Oregon, and ask for permission to use one of my shaded relief maps. A week or so later I noticed some interesting fires in Hell's Canyon, not too far from Enterprise, Oregon, home of the paper. So I ask Keith about them. He checked it out and said there were some fires there so this was my first actual verification that I was really seeing fires. Keith found the images very interesting and started adding them to the newspaper's web site. Sometime later I came across some very large fires in northern California and decided to build a separate web page to share the images with a wider audience. That was the start of the forest fire web pages here.