Components of water balance are derived in the Korean Peninsula. Because enough data are not available in the northern part of the peninsula, an alternative is adapted in this paper. At first, a set of monthly NDVI maps of the peninsula is derived and utilized for landcover classification and for evaluation of evapotranspiration distribution. Relationship between NDVI and evapotranspiration is confirmed from the groundtruth data in the southern part of the peninsula. The results are applied to estimate the evapotranspiration distribution over the peninsula. Combining the evapotranspiration, precipitation distribution and runoff calculated with a tank model, water balance is examined in both of the north and south parts of the peninsula. Some index maps are also derived and the climatic characteristics of the peninsula are shown.

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A newly developed multi-spectral polarimeter, MS-PHS, is described. It is designed to measure the radiance and degree of polarization of hemispherical sky radiation at the wavelength of OCTS and POLDER on board the ADEOS satellite launched in August, 1996. Accuracy of the measurement of the degree of polarization is discussed considering the effect of ship motions when the measurement is made on the ship. The measurements of the degree of polarization carried out on the waters around Shikoku Island of Japan is shown. The comparison between the measurement and the numerical simulation shows good agreement in the pattern of the degree of polarization and its maximum value in the principal plane.

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The ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission Radiometer) on EOS AM-1 satellite scheduled to be launched in 1998 includes three telescopes (VNIR : Visible and Near Infrared Radiometer, SWIR : Short Wave Infrared Radiometer, TIR : Thermal Infrared Radiometer) sensitive to different wavelengths. As the telescopes are capable of changing sight directions, some inter-telescope registration technique among images with different spectral characteristics will be necessary. In this study, we propose a new registration technique using image matching to deal with these problems and show experimental results of subpixel accuracy for simulated ASTER images.

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The demand of effective retrieval system for vast satellite data has been increasing year by year. The browsing system of satellite data requires much more function such as checking of clouds to the whole satellite image or quality of the image. Besides effective use of the retrieval system requires excellent graphical user interface and good connectivity to the WWW (World Wide Web) service through Internet. Thumbnail images of approapriate size were selected and display on the window of the WWW browser Netscape Navigator. We tentatively constructed the satellite data retrieval system on WWW server and checked the practical performance of the browsing and retrieval of safellite data throught WWW browsing client on various machines from parsonal computer to workstation. The responce time to get satellite images on demand from huge amounts of acquired images was measured on the Internet and evaluated for practical use.

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Since the launch of Japanese earth observation satellite MIDORI (ADEOS: Advanced Earth Observing Satellite) on 17 August 1996, ADEOS had been obtaining earth observation data for about eight months until the stop of its operation on 30 June, 1997.
The stop of operation due to the malfunction of ADEOS satellite happened on the way of three-year mission life for the comprehensive understanding of the global change of the earth by Ocean Color and Temperature Scanner (OCTS), NASA Scatterometer (NSCAT), Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer. (TOMS), Polarization and Directionality of the Earth's Reflectances (POLDER), Interferometric Monitor for Greenhouse Gases (IMG), Improved Limb Atmospheric Spectrometer (ILAS), Retoreflector in Space (RIS), so that practical uses such as the improvement of weather forcast using the measurement data of the global sea surface wind by NSCAT, the continuous monitoring of the global total ozone concentration by TOMS, the near-real time observation of the ocean color and sea surface temperature monitoring by OCTS, the land cover classification and digital elevation model (DEM) by Advanced Visible and Near-Infrared Radiometer (AVNIR) and so on had obliged to be canceled or scaled down.
OCTS data of 7, 408 paths had been archived or scheduled for archiving as of 8 July, 1997 at Earth Observation Center (EOC)/National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA). Although the data have been distributed on near-real time basis through Internet from 17 October, 1996, EOC/NASDA is intensively processing using Version 2 algorithm all archived level 0 data of OCTS to level 1 to be available for research uses on the global ocean and the aerosol distribution over the global ocean and it will be completed by the end of August 1997. Moreover, Earth Observation Research Center (EORC)/NASDA is developing OCTS version 3 algorithm by the end of September 1997 and plans to reprocess all OCTS data using this new version.
AVNIR data of 33, 014 scenes of multispectral bands and 19, 300 scenes of panchromatic band had been archived or scheduled for archiving as of 8 July, 1997. The data distribution for the general users had begun from 7 May, 1997 by Remote Sensing Technology Center (RESTEC).
For the other sensors, the early routine operation of TOMS and NSCAT started on 17 September, 1996 and started their distribution on near-real time basis on 21 September and 17 October, 1996, respectively.
NASDA is reviewing the plan of data processing and analysis to produce standard data products and the higher level datasets as composit datasets from eight sensors onboard ADEOS.
This paper reports the present status of data archiving and processing.

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