Remotely sensed data, especially that from the Advanced Very High Resolutio
n Radiometer (AVHRR), are increasingly being used to analyze changes in the
global environment. This research analyzes two of the most commonly used r
emote sensing data sets for global environmental change research, the Natio
nal Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Global Vegetation Index
(GVI) data and the new NOAA/National Aeronautics and Space Administration'
s (NASA) Pathfinder AVHRR Land (PAL) data set, to determine if the new PAL
data have successfully removed the major sensor-related problems found in t
he GVI data. Principal Components Analysis of the data for the geographic r
egion of China is used with results indicating that sensor-related problems
remain in the PAL data, though not as severely as in the GVI data. For the
time period of 1982 to 1992, the GVI and PAL data suffer from problems of
spatial misregistration and radiometric miscalibration. The problem of orbi
tal drift, however, has been minimized in the PAL data.