Direct Broadcast at the Institute for Marine Remote Sensing The Institute for Marine Remote Sensing (IMaRS), located at the University of South Florida College of Marine Science, in St. Petersburg, FL, USA, has involved in direct broadcast since The goal of the IMaRS direct broadcast activities is to provide valid and timely environmental information based on remotely sensed and in-situ datasets to researchers, educators, government, and industry on international, nation, state, and local scales. The Earth Observing System DB station at IMaRS provides unique fulfillment to regional data user due to the area of coverage our location provides as well as our ties with the Caribbean data user community. IMaRS currently has two receiving antennas from SeaSpace Corporation, one for L-band reception (SeaWiFS and AVHRR) and another for X-band reception (MODIS Terra and Aqua). Processing Software: Scheduling and capture done with TeraScan from SeaSpace. Automation done with Simple, Scalable, Script-based, Science Processor (S4P), and with the S4P Router to utilize S4P in a clustered environment. Data is processed with MODAPS type code, MOD_PR02, MODCOL, to make data products very close to those available at the DAAC’s. Mapping is done with in-house developed map_modis software. Map_modis is written in the Perl Data Language (PDL), and a little C++. Map_modis is very flexible and makes the best 250m images available, as well as all of the other images here. IMaRS Processing System Summary (6) Estuary monitoring 250-m and 500-m data are used to generate RGB images online. IMaRS is working on algorithm to make quantitative use of these bands. (2) Fish forecast USF IMaRS is working with ocean fishing industry to provide fishing forecast maps on a daily basis. Ocean fronts are annotated on these maps to help identify fish. IMaRS Educational Applications: Teacher workshops School classroom demonstrations Environmental Distance Learning (EDL) IMaRS DB Applications: Judd Taylor, Frank Muller-Karger, Chuanmin Hu, Brock Murch Acknowledgements: NASA Headquarters (Dr. Jim Dodge) SeaSpace Corporation USF Financial and Technical Support All of our partners Contact: Judd Taylor 011 (727) ; Figure 1: IMaRS receives data from seven remote sensing platforms daily covering the entire Intra Americas Sea (IAS) and Western Atlantic. This is a typical MODIS daily coverage. Processing Hardware: 2 IDE RAID5 File Servers with >4TB Storage ~($8000/ea) GigE Copper Interconnect (cheap switches, ~ $1400) 5X Dual AMD 64-bit Opteron Nodes, 1GB (~$2000/ea) 5X AMD Athlon XP Nodes, 512MB (~$1200/ea) Figure 3: Very simplified data flow showing the IMaRS processing system Figure 2: X-band antenna, S4P Cluster, L-band antenna Figure 9: 250m image of Chesapeake Bay. Figure 4: MODIS chl-a image showing features (red arrows) that are possibly due to discharged treated industry water. Figure 5: Value-added maps for the commercial fishing industry, Courtesy ROFFS (4) Real-time assistance with field campaign IMaRS is helping Mote Marine Lab to tag dolphins with MODIS real-time DB data. Dolphins often appear near ocean fronts. Twelve dolphins have been tagged in five days. Figure 7: IMaRS data products used to find ocean fronts (color and temperature) for dolphin tagging. Note the increment in temperature. USF IMaRS has been continuously using both historical and real- time data for scientific applications such as coastal carbon dynamics and water quality monitoring. In addition, we have developed several applications where real-time data availability is critical: 1) Ocean discharge monitoring (Figure 4) 2) Fishing forecast (Figure 5) 3) Pollution (oil spill) monitoring (Figure 6) 4) Real-time assistance with field campaign (7) 5) Bloom and Plume monitoring (including red tides) (Fig. 8) 6) Estuary monitoring (Figure 9) (1) Discharge monitoring USF IMaRS is using MODIS DB data to help the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to monitor the potential environmental impact of the industry water discharge on the ocean. Such a monitoring is performed on a daily basis, with customized data products for location and color stretching. Chlorophyll contrast of 0.01 – 0.02 mg/m3 (Figure 4) is detected due to the high sensitivity of MODIS instrument. Such a small contrast is very likely treated by ship survey as noise. MODIS Terra and Aqua provide twice as much daily coverage as from SeaWiFS, therefore significantly improve the daily monitoring. (3) Pollution detection and tracking MODIS DB data (250-m) provides an unprecedented too to monitor oil spills in aquatic environment because of its extensive spatial coverage and daily revisit and moderate resolution. All global data are freely available at DAAC. Figure 7: Oil spill detection. Top: MODIS DB data (250-m) over Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela; Bottom: Aerial photograph showing oil spill patches. (5) Blooms/Plumes IMaRS is monitoring water quality (including red tides) at several coastal system, including the coral reef near the Florida Keys. Figure 8. Dark water patches observed from MODIS DB imagery. MODIS Nov. 12, 2003