Airborne remote sensing instrumentation for NEON: Status and development

Abstract

Airborne remote sensing plays a crucial role in the scaling strategy underpinning the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) design.12 Airborne spectroscopy will quantify plant species type and function, and waveform LiDAR will quantify vegetation structure and heterogeneity at the scale of individual shrubs and larger plants over hundreds of square kilometers. Digital imagery at better than 30 cm resolution will retrieve fine-scale information regarding land use, impervious surfaces, and built structures. NEON will operate three airborne systems to allow for routine coverage of NEON sites (60 sites nationally) and provide the capacity to respond to investigator requests for specific projects. The NEON system design achieves a balance between performance and development cost and risk, taking full advantage of existing commercial airborne LiDAR and camera components. Requirements for the imaging spectrometer require significant technology advancement. A pushbroom imaging spectrometer is under development to simultaneously achieve high spatial and spectral uniformity in response as well as high signal-to-noise ratio across a broad spectral range and over a wide field of view. To reduce risk during NEON construction, a spectrometer design verification unit is under development by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to demonstrate that the design meets performance and operational requirements. Additional activities including algorithm development, computing hardware prototyping and early airborne test flights with similar technologies to reduce science data product development risk. Here we present an overview of system design, key requirements and development status of the NEON airborne instrumentation.