From the perspective of non remote-sensing scientists, the greatest benefit from EOS will be that actual biophysical variables of the land surface will be regularly and automatically produced. This includes global coverage every 1 to 8 days of estimates of biophysical variables that have land applications to hydrology, forest and range management, and fire management.

The UM-EOS Training Center will accelerate the incorporation of EOS data products relevent to natural resource managers by:

  1. downloading NASA EOS data products relevant to land managers,
  2. translating selected core EOS land products into units and formats more understandable and relevant to land managers,
  3. allowing for subsetting of data streams to specific management areas with value added enhancements, and
  4. providing hands-on training to resource managers on how to find, download, display, and interpret EOS data relevant to them.


Most UM-EOS Training Center data will be collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on the Terra platform scheduled for launch in early 2000. Actual data from the satellite will be available for public use approximately 6 months after launch. We initially plan to provide data and training for application products in the management areas of wildland fire management, forest and range land vegetation production, and climatology. Our collaborators, Dr. David Verbyla (The University of Alaska - Fairbanks) and Dr. David Larsen (The University of Missouri), are especially interested in Landsat-7 applications. These interests will add additional applications of EOS data to the Training Center.

As the processing capabilities of the Training Center develop, we also plan to expand the spatial and temporal coverage of EOS application products to include an international audience. Many EOS application products relevant to natural resource land managers will be processed by NASA at full global coverage on a daily or weekly time step. This quality and quantity of data has never been available and will add significant information to the management decision making process.