Zusammenfassung: As the CoastWatch regional node for the Great Lakes, the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL) is working to obtain and/or develop and deliver environmental data and products for near real-time monitoring of the Great Lakes to support environmental science and decision making. In support of this goal, GLERL is providing access to near real-time and retrospective satellite observations and in-situ data for the Great Lakes to Federal, state, and local agencies and academic institutions. There are currently nearly 40 regional CoastWatch users. The goals and objectives of the Great Lakes CoastWatch Program directly support agency statutory responsibilities in estuarine and marine science, living marine resource protection, and ecosystem monitoring and management. GLERL is currently receiving an enhanced digital image product suite of 26 images including satellite derived surface-temperature, visible and near-infrared reflectance, brightness temperatures, satellite and solar zenith angle data, and cloud masks from the NOAA-12 satellite. These products are downloaded from the NOAA Ocean Products Center (OPC) via INTERNET on a daily basis and archived at GLERL. Over 32,000 image products have been received and archived since becoming the Great Lakes CoastWatch Node in 1990. GOES-8 data is also currently being received.

Zusammenfassung: When histograms are used instead of raw data to estimate parameters by the maximum likelihood method, data has an error distributed according to a regular distribution among the width of the histogram. This influence on the estimation of parameters is evaluated by the linearized error propagation rule. Covariance is in proportion to the width squared and in inverse proportion to the number of data. Even if the number of data is large, the precision is low for small normal distributions. In practice, an adequate width will be given by the shapes of the histograms.