Amazon Wetland Mosaics from 1999 Aerial Validation Flights

VOAM99 provides 1-meter resolution geocoded aerial mosaics of the Brazilian Amazon from June 1999. The data was collected via digital camcorder systems on a Bandeirante survey plane operated by Brazil's National Institute for Space Research. It serves as a high-resolution validation dataset for satellite-based land cover mapping in the region.

Use Cases

• Acquiring ground control points for geolocating satellite imagery like JERS-1 data.
• Validating wetland cover maps generated by projects such as the Global Rain Forest Mapping (GRFM) Project.
• Estimating forest biomass for the Amazon Basin.
• Conducting rapid assessment of fire damage in forested areas.
• Environmental monitoring of savannas, forests, and human-impacted areas at high resolution.

Strengths

• Provides very high spatial resolution on the order of 1 meter for ground verification.
• Covers a wide range of land cover types including wetlands, forests, savannas, and human-impacted areas across the Brazilian Amazon.
• Data is geocoded into GeoTIFF format, making it directly usable in GIS applications.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as row count, file size, and specific column names are unavailable from all sources.
• Sources conflict on the last updated date, with one listing 1999-06 19 and another listing 2026-03-13, suggesting potential metadata inconsistency.
• Temporal coverage is limited to a single wet-season month (June 1999).

Provenance

Source

Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere (LBA) Experiment, Validation Overflight for Amazon Mosaics (VOAM) project.

Collection Method

Aerial video surveys using digital camcorder systems installed on a Bandeirante survey plane.

Time Range

1999-06

Freshness

2026-03-13 01:14:46.621625

Geography

Brazilian Amazon