MONITORING OF WATER CHARACTERISTIC USING THE SYNCHRONOUS 
OBSERVATION DATA OF LANDSAT AND NOAA 
Hiroaki Ochiai 
Oceanography Department, Toba Merchant Marine College 
1-1 lkegami-cho, Toba-shi, Mie-ken, Japan 517 
ABSTRACT 
Using the MSS data obtained from Landsat and AVHRR data obtained from NOAA 
due to the synchronous observation, the monitoring of water characteristic in 
some coastal areas around Japan is studied and the effectiveness of the 
combination of visible data of MSS and thermal infrared data of AVHRR for 
estimation of marine environment is recognized as well. The analysis procedure 
is consisted by path radiance correction of Landsat-MSS data and the geometric 
correction and temperature calibration of NOAA-AVHRR data. 
From the results of analysis, the negative correlation between turbidity 
and sea surface temperature was found in several bay and coastal areas, which 
indicates that the land origin water from the specific land area such as high 
population area and industrial area is considered as the main source for water 
polution' in those areas. On the other hand, the clean contrast between cold 
water originating from land water and warm water originating from oceanic water 
under the influences of Kuroshio current, the biggest warm current in the world 
is carried out from the sea surface temperature pattern derived from NOAA-AVHRR 
data. 
INTRODUCTION 
Since the high spatial resolution multispectral data of Landsat-MSS has 
become available in 1972, many reports have been published in the application of 
MSS data to the monitoring of marine environment in coastal area(Ref. 15 253,4) 
and the author descried the effectiveness of Landsat-MSS data as the real time 
information in broad area in these reports. From the beginning of 1979 when 
The Earth Observation Center of National Space Development Agency of Japan is 
started its performance, the study based on the application of MSS data to the 
monitoring of' marine environment in coastal areas around Japan is rapidly 
increased and the number of report have been published in Japan for a year is 
inclining to increase year by year as well as in foreign countries. 
Due to the limitation of spectral bandwidth, the information obtained from 
the analysis of MSS data is focused on the detection of turbidity of water in 
coastal areas at the time of satellite pass. Moreover, the limitation of field 
of view of Landsat-MSS, the information carried out from the analysis of MSS 
data is centered on the estimation of water characteristics in narrow coastal 
areas. 
Although the spatial resolution is lower than that of Landsat-MSS, a 
meteorological satellite NOAA-AVHRR can offer another very useful information, 
i.e. sea surface temperature(SST) of the wider area(Ref. 5). In addition, NOAA 
has an advantage in frequency of observation since it can be observe the same 
area twice a day while in case of Landsat-MSS it is every 18 day which is a 
great disadvantage for the monitoring of marine environment. 
Thus if the information obtained from Landsat-MSS is highly correlated with 
that of NOAA-AVHRR, the combined use of the data obtained by both sensors will 
be great help for daily monitoring of marine environment especially in coastal 
areas. 
In this study, the author described the method of processing and some 
results of combined use of the Landsat-MSS and NOAA-AVHRR data due to the 
synchronous observation in the following section.