The exciting and totally unanticipated success of the AVHRR in applications for which it was never intended Original Research Article

The AVHRR was conceived in the mid 1970s as a scanning radiometer for meteorological purposes and was first launched on a polar-orbiting satellite in 1978. But since then — for a whole variety of reasons — it has come to be one of the most valuable sources of data for non-meteorological purposes in a whole variety of environmental scientific and management contexts. This paper reviews this success of the AVHRR.