MASTER: Airborne Multispectral Imagery for Gulf Oil Spill Analysis

Nine NASA ER-2 flights collected 50-band multispectral imagery at 50-meter resolution over the Gulf of America and 13 U.S. states in 2010. This deployment specifically targeted the Deepwater Horizon-BP oil spill, providing Level 1B calibrated radiance data and derived Level 2 products for emissivity and land surface temperature. The dataset includes ancillary flight path, instrument configuration, and summary information for each mission.

Use Cases

• Mapping oil spill extent and characteristics based on multispectral radiance imagery.
• Analyzing land surface temperature and emissivity variations across diverse terrains.
• Calibrating or validating satellite-derived thermal infrared products using airborne data.
• Studying coastal and inland environmental changes following a major pollution event.

Strengths

• Provides high-resolution (50m) multispectral data across 50 spectral bands from visible to thermal infrared.
• Includes derived geophysical products (emissivity, land surface temperature) alongside raw calibrated radiance.
• Covers a wide geographic area across 13 states and the Gulf of America over a focused one-month period.

Limitations

• Metadata completeness is medium; column names and exact row/size counts are not provided.
• Conflicting 'last updated' dates (2026-04-10 on datagov vs. 2010-09-01 on nasa_earthdata) create uncertainty about metadata freshness.
• License is specified as 'other-license-specified' without explicit details, requiring user investigation.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Data collected via the MODIS/ASTER Airborne Simulator (MASTER) instrument aboard a NASA ER-2 aircraft.

Time Range

2010-07 31 to 2010-09-01

Freshness

2026-04-10 01:20:02.103061 (from datagov, conflicting with nasa_earthdata date)

Geography

Gulf of America and portions of California, Colorado, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, New Mexico, Texas, Arkansas, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida