Digital imaging and gridding of AIRS Visible/NIR data

To visualize satellite remote sensing data on a 2-dimensional plane, irregularly-spaced measurements must be registered onto a user-defined raster grid. There are several simple ways to do this, including the nearest-neighbor sampling and bilinear interpolation method. However, none of these methods make use of satellite scan geometry information nor do they take the footprint size into account. This work summarizes the results of a study on the characteristics of AIRS viewing geometry, more specifically the growth of AIRS Vis/NIR (Visible/Near-infared) footprint size, as a function of viewing angles. It also demonstrates the fusion of these useful pieces of information in visualizing the AIRS data. Finally, broader application of this general resampling and gridding technique is briefly discussed.