This page provides access to the lecture slide decks used in CoastWatch training courses. The lectures are designed to be short (about 20 minutes when narrated), and many have narrated versions available on YouTube. Use the table below to preview a lecture in your browser or download the slides for offline viewing.
Click the eye icon to open the lecture, download to go to the source file, play button to view the narrated lecture, and clipboard to read the transcript of the narrated lecture.
Lecture
Preview
Download
Video
Transcript
Introduction to CoastWatch An overview of the NOAA/NESDIS CoastWatch program, it's different regional nodes, and the satellite products and services it offers.
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Satellite 101, Part 1 This presentation covers the basics of ocean remote sensing, part 1.
Satellite 101, Part 2 This presentation covers EMR (electromagnetic radiation), atmospheric correction, and the differences between passive and active sensors.
Tools and Strategy This presentation provides an overview of CoastWatch data services and tools, showing how to find, visualize, and access satellite oceanographic data using NetCDF files, data viewers, and ERDDAP to simplify working with multiple data servers and formats.
Introduction to ERDDAP This presentation introduces ERDDAP and demonstrates how it simplifies discovering, visualizing, subsetting, and downloading gridded and tabular oceanographic datasets from multiple satellite and in situ data servers through a consistent web interface and URL-based queries.
Ocean Color This presentation covers the basic principals behind ocean color satellite data and gives an overview of the suite of products generated by ocean color satellites.
Sea Surface Temperature This presentation explains how sea surface temperature is measured from space, comparing infrared and microwave satellite sensors, discussing atmospheric effects and data limitations, and introducing commonly used Level-3 and Level-4 blended SST products available through NOAA CoastWatch.
Satellite Sea Surface Height, Altimetry, Winds, and Salinity This presentation explains how satellite microwave sensors are used to measure sea surface salinity, surface winds, and sea surface height, comparing passive and active sensing techniques and showing how these observations are combined into long, gap-free datasets for studying ocean circulation, storms, and large-scale climate variability.
How to Select the Best Dataset for Your Project This presentation provides a practical framework for choosing the most appropriate satellite dataset for a project by evaluating tradeoffs in temporal and spatial coverage, resolution, latency versus quality, and tolerance for missing data, with examples drawn from common CoastWatch products.
Intro to Using R with Satellite Data This presentation introduces how to use R with ERDDAP, focusing on the rerddapXtracto package to extract, visualize, and analyze satellite oceanographic data for applications such as track matchups, polygon-based regions, time series, and habitat analyses using reproducible R workflows.
Using Satellite Data in ArcGIS This presentation introduces how to work with satellite oceanographic data in GIS, covering imagery versus data products, formats such as NetCDF and GeoTIFF, metadata and projections, and practical considerations for visualizing and analyzing CoastWatch satellite datasets using ArcGIS (with concepts applicable to other GIS software).
Selecting and Using Data in ArcGIS This presentation focuses on the tools and workflows for using satellite data in GIS, demonstrating ArcGIS built-in tools, extensions, and external utilities (including ERDDAP, THREDDS, the Environmental Data Connector, and CoastWatch Utilities) to import, subset, visualize, time-enable, and export multidimensional satellite datasets for analysis.
Water Quality This presentation introduces how satellite remote sensing is used to assess water quality, explaining key satellite-derived parameters such as chlorophyll-a, turbidity, CDOM, suspended sediments, algal blooms, and light attenuation, along with their limitations, accuracy considerations, and applications in coastal, inland, and Great Lakes environments.
Sea Ice This presentation describes the different types of sea ice products available, and where and how to access them.
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) This presentation provides a comprehensive introduction to Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), explaining how SAR works, what oceanic, atmospheric, and coastal features it can detect, the advantages and limitations of radar measurements, and where to access and work with SAR data products available through NOAA CoastWatch and partner archives.
GitHub Software Tutorials An overview of the different tutorials developed by CoastWatch for working with satellite data with R or python software.
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Acknowledgements
The CoastWatch training materials have been developed, reviewed, and edited with contributions from many dedicated individuals:
Andrea Vander Woude — Code/content development, review
Victoria Wegman — Content review/editing
Cara Wilson — Code/content development, review
We also extend our gratitude to additional external contributors whose acknowledgements are included within the training materials they helped to create.