Professional Documents
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Part I: the WIST site for ASTER images (and other satellite
data)
A. Setting the search parameters in WIST
1. As far as I’ve been able to determine, data searches and downloads at WIST work fine on a Mac.
2. Go to the main WIST page at
https://wist.echo.nasa.gov/~wist/api/imswelcome/
3. This page will tell you if the WIST site is down for some reason. If it’s down, come back later.
4. Go to Enter WIST. You will use the site as a guest.
5. You’ll see that there’s a tremendous amount of data from lots of different sources that are
accessible at the WIST site. We’re only going to look for ASTER data.
6. Set the search parameters as follows:
a. Choose Land, ASTER.
b. In the pulldown above the list with the radio buttons, choose L1A Reconstructed
Unprocessed Instrument Data V003.
c. Choose By discipline (that’s the default), Primary Data Search (also the default), and Type
in Lat/Lon Point (not the default).
d. Enter the lat/lon coordinates 24° 43’N, 30° 42’E (and notice that you have to enter the
numbers with a colon between the degrees and minutes).
e. Choose start date 01/01/2000; end date 01-01-2010
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B. Searching for images
1. Click Start Search, and be patient. The site will tell you how long your search has been running.
If the site is running fast, it shouldn’t take more than a minute or two to find your images.
2. When your search results page comes up, you’ll see a list of what are called Data Granules –
these are the individual ASTER “tiles” that include all of the bands. At the bottom of your list,
you’ll see two click boxes if you have more than 10 granules. When I did this, I had 14 granules.
Just click on the 11-… box to see the next set of granules.
3. The Image QuickLook column lets you see a low-res browse image for your granule. Click on
Browse* for your first data granule. Be patient – don’t keep clicking – just wait until the image
comes up. The browse image comes up as three images – scroll down to see a browse image from
the three band sets (visible, short wave infrared, and thermal infrared).
4. Go back to the search results page, and click to see each of the browse images for the available
granules. You’ll see that not all of them would be worth ordering (some are cloud-covered, others
are just odd).
5. Choose three good ones, and put a check mark in the Select box for each of your three chosen
granules. Go back to the browse pages for each, and print out the browse page that shows the
three band sets for each.
6. Go back to the search results page, make sure the you have a check in the boxes for your three
granules, and click Add selections to cart. Click Accept – Continue to Shopping Cart.
7. At this point, you’re dead in the water unless you are an authorized user with an account. You
either have to pay for the imagery, have a NASA account for research, or have an educational
account that lets you download a certain number of granules. If you were an authorized user, you
could click Choose Options and select the ASTER products that you wanted. WIST would then
email you an ftp link where you could go download your data. I have done that for a couple of
ASTER images for all y’all, and we will work with them in class.
C. ASTER data for class
1. Go to our class data folder, and download the ASTER images in the folder, and save them to your
hard drive. Extract the files and get them ready to use. You can preview them in ArcCatalog.
c. The 61 and 62 bands are very low resolution thermal infrared bands, and you have better
data from ASTER for thermal infrared. The .met file is the metadata, but it’s in the file
headers and will come in to ArcMap with the .tifs that you download. And you don’t need
the browse images.
d. Once you’ve downloaded the bands for the first image, download the second set. Expand
all of the files.
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