The files \DOCUMENT\AVHRR\DOCUMENT.WP and DOCUMENT.ASC are Word
Perfect 5.1 and ASCII versions of a manuscript published in the
Bulletin of the Ameri can Meteorological Society that describe this
data set.

The data are all unheaded binary raster grids, which have become a
"de- facto standard for raster data interchange. They may be
imported into most image processing and raster geographic
information systems. Software which creates its own separate header
files, or which embeds header information into the data file,
usually contains routines which assist the user in importing this
unheaded binary raster grid format. The following informa tion
might help in this importing of the data: 

All the data in the AVHRRCLI directory (and its subdirectories) on
Disc 1 conforms to NOAA's Global Vegetation Index format: 

904 rows of imagery
2500 columns of imagery
each data value is 8-bits (byte data)

The northern edge is nominally 75 degrees north latitude
(Additional sleuthing suggests that the actual northern edge of the
northernmost grid cell is 75 degrees, 5 minutes, 16.8 seconds north
lat.)

The southern edge is nominally 55 degrees south latitude
(Additional sleuthing suggests that the actual southern edge of the
southernmost grid cell is 55 degrees, 5 minutes, 16.8 degrees south
lat.) 

The western edge is 180 degrees west longitude
The eastern edge is 180 degrees east longitude
The "projection" is Plate Carree (otherwise known as 
latitude-longitude).

The grid cell sizes are 8 minutes 38.4 seconds. (This is the
standard NOAA Global Vegetation Index product grid, used since 1982
for the production of the Global Vegetation Index product.)

The origin of each image is the northwest corner. The second data
value is the value to the east of the origin, along the first row.
The data follow eastward accross the top row, then eastward along
each row to the south. The last value in the file is for the
southeastern corner of the image. This pattern is identical to the
scanning pattern for raster displays, such as televisions.
Additional information about the data is contained in the
\document\avhrrcli directory. 

Data in the data\ncillary directory are in a similar format, except
that they cover 90 degrees north to south latitude, and have
different grid spacings, such as 10 or 30 minutes. Data in the
data\ncillary\avhrrclrg subdirectory have grid spacings of 10
minutes, with 1080 columns and 2160 rows. 

(There is an exception to the 90 degrees north to south coverage:
There are 4 versions of the FAO soils data: (1) the original data
at 2-minute gridding between 90 north and 90 south, (2) three
resamplings of the 2-minute data to register with the authors'
standard grid described above.)