SAF

The main purpose of the Land SAF during the development phase was to increase the benefits from MSG and EPS data related to land, land-atmosphere interactions and biophysical applications, namely by developing techniques, products and algorithms that will allow a more effective use of data from the two planned EUMETSAT satellites. Although directly designed to improve the observation of meteorological systems, the spectral characteristics, time resolution and global coverage offered by MSG and EPS allow for their use in a broad spectrum of other applications, namely within the scope of land biophysical applications. Besides the fact that the meteorological users had been considered as having the highest priority, the Land SAF addresses a much broader community and it is therefore to be anticipated that the Land SAF will have to efficiently interface with a large number of others potential Land Application Users. The spectral characteristics, time resolution and global coverage offered by MSG and EPS allow for their use in a broad spectrum of land surface applications and the broad scope of the Land SAF is therefore to increase the benefits from MSG and EPS data related to land, land-atmosphere interactions and biospheric applications by developing techniques that will allow a more effective use of data from the two planned EUMETSAT satellite series (MSG and EPS).

The University of the Aegean, Dept of Environmental studies, participated in the Development Phase (September 1999 – December 2004) and my personal involvement was to assist in the development of an automatic algorithm for the extraction of a qualitative index of dust loads from AVHRR satellite images.