Development of airborne remote sensing instrumentation for NEON

Background/Question/Methods

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a planned facility of the National Science Foundation. NEON’s mission is to enable understanding and forecasting of the impacts of climate change, land use change and invasive species on continental-scale ecology. Airborne remote sensing plays a critical role by providing measurements at the scale of individual shrubs and larger plants over hundreds of square kilometers. The NEON Airborne Observation Platform (AOP) is designed to bridge scales from organism and stand scales as captured by plot and tower observations, to the scale of satellite based remote sensing. Fused airborne spectroscopy and waveform LiDAR from the AOP will quantify vegetation composition and structure. Panchromatic photography at better than 30 cm resolution will retrieve fine-scale information regarding land use, roads, impervious surfaces, and built structures. NEON will build three airborne systems to allow for routine coverage of NEON sites and the capacity to respond to investigator requests for specific projects. The system design achieves a balance between performance, and development cost and risk, taking full advantage of existing commercial airborne LiDAR and camera components. To reduce development risk during NEON construction, an imaging spectrometer design verification unit is being developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to demonstrate that operational and performance requirements can be met. As part of this effort, NEON is also focusing on science algorithm development, computing hardware prototyping and early airborne test flights with similar technologies. This paper presents an overview of system design, key requirements and development status of the NEON airborne instrumentation. 

Results/Conclusions

The remote sensing instrument payload for the NEON Airborne Observatory Platform is under development to support the mapping of vegetation over the continental-scale defined by the NEON sites. The broad range of ecosystems represented by these sites and the range of atmospheric conditions under which operations will occur, place significant constraints on instrument performance, calibration accuracy, and atmospheric correction during operations. We discuss how  data sets from early pathfinder campaigns being applied to addressing these issues as well as how the remote sensing instrument payload has been configured to meet these requirements.