Environmental monitoring of southeast asia using MODIS direct broadcast data

Abstract

The direct broadcast of MODIS data from the TERRA and AQUA satellites provides new opportunities for realtime and precision environmental monitoring of the Southeast Asia region. In this paper, we describe our centre's efforts to set up a regional environmental monitoring system making use of the direct broadcast data. The system will automatically processes any MODIS DB data to level 2, and performs near-realtime detection of impending environmental disasters, such as fire hot spots, algal blooms, smoke haze and floods. The extracted information is disseminated immediately to interested stakeholders via emails. Besides the near-realtime products, cloud-free composite products such as land surface reflectance, coastal sea suspended sediments and chlorophyll distribution are produced to study the spatial and temporal changes in the states of the environment.