The goal of the Alaska Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) project is to compile a time series data set of calibrated, georegistered daily observations and twice-monthly maximum normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) composites for Alaska's annual growing season (April-October). This data set has applications for environmental monitoring and for assessing impacts of global climate change. An Alaska AVHRR data set is comprised of twice-monthly maximum NDVI composites of daily satellite observations. The NDVI composites contain 10 bands of information, including AVHRR channels 1-5, maximum NDVI, satellite zenith, solar zenith, and relative azimuth. The daily observations, bands 1-9, have been calibrated to reflectance, scaled to byte data, and geometrically registered to the Albers Equal-Area Conic map projection. The 10th band is a pointer to identify the date and scene ID of the source daily observation (scene) for each pixel.

The compositing process required each daily overpass to be registered to a common map projection to ensure that from day to day each 1-km pixel represented the exact same ground location. The Albers Equal-Area Conic map projection provides for equal area representation, which enables easy measurement of area throughout the data. Each daily observation for the growing season was registered to a base image using image-to-image correlation.

The NDVI data are calculated from the calibrated, geometrically registered daily observations. The NDVI value is the difference between near-infrared (AVHRR Channel 2) and visible (AVHRR Channel 1) reflectance values divided by total measured reflectance. A maximum NDVI compositing process was used on the daily observations. The NDVI is examined pixel by pixel for each observation during the compositing period to determine and retain the maximum value. Often when displaying data covering large areas, such as AVHRR data, it is beneficial to include an overlay of either familiar linework for reflectance or polygon data sets to derive statistical summaries of regions. All of the linework images represent lines in raster format as 1-km cells and the strata are represented as polygons registered to the AVHRR data. The linework and polygon data sets include international boundaries, Alaskan roads with the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and a raster polygon mask of the State.