Spatial degradation of satellite data

Abstract

Consideration is given to a technique for spatially degrading high-resolution satellite data to produce comparable data sets over a range of coarser resolutions. Landsat MSS data is used to produce seven spatial resolution data sets by applying a spatial filter designed to simulate sensor response. Also, spatial degradation of coarse resolution data to provide data compression for the production of global-scale data sets is examined. NOAA AVHRR Global Area Coverage data is compared to other sampling procedures. It is found that sampling procedures that incorporate averaging result in decreased variance, while sampling procedures adopting single-value selection have higher variances and produce data values comparable with those from the original data.