Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island

Hokkaido, the northernmost and second largest island of Japan’s four main islands, was captured on 26 September 2006 by Envisat’s MERIS (Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer) instrument and transmitted via Kodama to Tsukuba where it was recorded and pre-processed by the Envisat data-processing equipment. This pre-processed data was then transmitted via a data link to ESRIN - ESA’s Earth Observation Centre in Italy – for final processing into data ‘products’ and data quality checks.