Glossary

A multi-decadal summary of landscape wetness that can be used to identify wetlands and groundwater ecosystems.

The science and technology of automatic measurement and transmission of data by wire, radio or other means from remote sources (e.g. space vehicles) to receiving stations for recording and analysis.

A multi-national NASA scientific research satellite in a sun-synchronous orbit around the Earth. It carries five remote sensors designed to monitor the state of the Earth’s environment:

• ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer)
• CERES (Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System)
• MISR (Multi-angle Imaging Spectroradiometer)
• MODIS (Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer)
• MOPITT (Measurements of Pollution in the Troposphere)

An advanced, multispectral-scanning, Earth resources sensor featured on Landsat 4 and 5. 

TM is designed to acquire data to categorise the Earth's surface and is particularly useful for agricultural applications and identification of land use. It continuously scans the surface of the Earth, simultaneously acquiring data in seven spectral channels.

For more information, see Landsat Science: The Thematic Mapper, Glossary: Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+)

An National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) server, which is a high-performance and high-availability installation of Unidata's Thematic Real-time Environmental Distributed Data Services (THREDDS).

THREDDS serves many of NCI’s open data collections at the file level, as well as some aggregations. It provides many different types of services to allow individual files to be selected, as well as more advanced services such as OpenDAP, NetCDF subsetting, OGC WCS and WMS. 

For more information, see NCI: Data Services.

The time in seconds from satellite apogee (the point of orbit at which the satellite is furthest from the Earth).