Introduction
Avhrr data can be used to look at many different oceanographic features. We use Avhrr channel four which gives a brightness temperature that closely resembles the sea surface temperature if you could take out clouds and other atmospheric disturbances to channel four. The resolution on these images is 1.1 kilometer at nadir. We receive on average three images in a day in the California region.

Data collection
Data is received at a antenna in San Diego at the Seaspace Corporation and stored in terascan data format(TDF). The files are named YYDDD.HHMM.SAT where YY is the year, DDD is the year day, HH is the hour in gmt, MM is the minutes, and SAT is the satellite number n9, n10, n11 or n12. Once data is received it is then calibrated and registered to the California region and ready to be looked at.

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