News & Events

NCEO Airborne Earth Observation Capability Announcement of Opportunity for 2020 VIS-SWIR-LWIR Acquisition

Following a successful first campaign in 2019, in June-July 2020 the UK science community have a unique opportunity through NCEO to take advantage of UK and European flights carrying the NASA JPL Hyperspectral Thermal Emission Spectrometer (HyTES) – only second time the instrument will have flown outside N America

 

  • HyTES level 1b data represent calibrated radiances in 256 spectral bands (7.5 to 12 µm), with Level 2 data provided by JPL being land surface temperature and emissivity retrievals, and Level 3 retrievals of atmospheric trace gases over areas showing elevated CH4, H2S, NH3, NO2, and/or SO2. Existing HyTES data.
  • As in 2019, HyTES is again being installed on the NERC Twin Otter, owned and operated by British Antarctic Survey, see here.
  • Alongside HyTES its planned to operate the NERC/NCEO Fenix hyperspectral imager (0.4 to 2.5 µm; 620 bands), and probably the LWIR OWL hyperspectral imager and/or the Phase 1 Very Hi-Res 100 MP RGB digital camera (https://www.nceo.ac.uk/facilities/). Georeferenced data (level 3b)  will be provided by NEODAAS, including potentially Fenix data atmospheric correction and reflectance conversion.
  • Community data acquisition can be supported in UK (likely 8th June to 4th July) and Spain (likely 8th to 29th July). The campaign is being organised by NCEO- King’s College London, and resource from NASA, ESA, King’s and NCEO is supporting all campaign planning, instrument installation and operations costs.

To Apply

Applicants will need to provide funds to support their specific data collection requests (i.e. cost of flying their area of interest and processing data from the non-HyTES instruments). Costs will very much depend on the location and the area/shape of the targeted region, but typically maybe in the £5k to £15k range. Spatial resolutions of the order of a meter or so and acquisition areas of > 10 km² are possible. Deadline for expressing an interest is 31st March 2020.

To enquire about acquisition possibilities please email an “Airborne EO Enquiry” to both Martin Wooster (martin.wooster@kcl.ac.uk) and James Johnson (james.Johnson@kcl.ac.uk) mentioning your area of interest.