Proceedings Article | 3 October 2006
KEYWORDS: Aerosols, Climate change, Vegetation, Satellites, Climatology, Environmental monitoring, Environmental sensing, Clouds, Atmospheric modeling, Sensors
The Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that many collectiveobservations gave a aspect of a global warming and other changes in the climate system. It is very important to understand thisprocess accurately, and to construct the model by whom an environmental change is accurately forecast. Future earthobservation using satellite data should monitor global climate change, and should contribute to social benefits. Especially, human activities has given the big impacts to earth environment. This is a very complex affair, and nature itself also impacts the clouds,namely the seasonal variations. JAXA (former NASDA) has the plan of the Global Change Observation Mission (GCOM) formonitoring of global environmental change. SGLI (Second Generation GLI) onboard GCOM-C (Climate) satellite, which is one of this mission, is an optical sensor from Near-UV to TIR. SGLI can provide the various high accuracy products of aerosol, cloud information, various biophysical parameters (Biomass, Land Cover, Albedo, NPP, Water Stressed Vegetation, LST, etc.), coastal information (CDOM, SS, PAR, CHL, SST, etc.), and cryospheric information (Albedo, Snow/Ice Cover, NDII, Sea ice type, Snow Grain Size, NDSI, Snow Surface Temperature, etc.). This paper shows the introduction of the unique aspects and characteristics of the next generation satellite sensor, SGLI/GCOM-C, and shows the preliminary research for this sensor.