ESTABLISHMENT OF IITR-SATELLITE EARTH STATION

A NOAA-HRPT Satellite Earth Station (sponsored by DST, New Delhi) has been established at Department of Earth Sciences and has become operational since 24^th October 2002. This IITR – Satellite Earth Station (IITR-SES) has started acquiring AVHRR (Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer) data (almost ten scenes per day) from NOAA-12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 satellites. IITR-SES is a fully computerized and automatic satellite data acquisition system and works round the clock. The IITR-SES not only acquires data of India, but it also acquires data of many neighboring and other countries (e.g. Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Sri Lanka, Oman, part of Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgzstan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, parts of Mongolia, China and Russia). The IITR-SES is also equipped with a fixed GPS receiver and provides its own location, and GPS satellite based (all GPS satellites are having highly accurate atomic clocks in them) highly accurate timings (perhaps the most accurate clock in the IITR campus!) at any instant of time. Under the present DST project, Dr. Saraf is developing a methodology on NOAA-AVHRR data applications in earthquake studies. However, NOAA-AVHRR data have wide ranging applications including vegetation index mapping, drought and forest fire monitoring etc. It is important to note that this is the first NOAA-HRPT Satellite Earth Station in any educational institute/university in the country.