Analysis Ready Data of the Chinese GaoFen Satellite Data

Analysis Ready Data (ARD) has been greatly recommended by the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) for simplifying and fostering long time series analysis at large scale with minimum additional user effort. Landsat ARD has been successfully made and widely used for large scale analysis. Subsequently, the Chinese satellite data similar to Landsat data have been processed and will be processed into ARDs to promote the use of the Chinese satellite data. At the first stage of the mission, the 4 Wide Field Viewing (WFV) data on GaoFen 1 (GF1) covering the whole of China and the surrounding areas have been processed into ARD. The ARD is provided as standard tiles under a common and unified projection with per pixel quality assurance and metadata for tracing back and further processing data, which are finally stored into a Hierarchical Data File (HDF); furthermore, all spectral bands are georegistered and radiometrically cross-calibrated as top of atmosphere (TOA) reflectance and are atmospherically corrected as surface reflectance (SR). Therefore, the ARD can be further used easily to produce land cover and land cover change maps and retrieve geophysical and biophysical parameters.

Automated summary

Analysis Ready Data (ARD) simplifies and fosters large scale long time series analysis with minimal user effort, making it widely used for data processing such as Landsat and the Chinese satellite data. ARD provides standard tiles with per pixel quality assurance and metadata, enhancing the capability to produce land cover change maps and retrieve geophysical and biophysical parameters.