MASTER Airborne Multispectral Data for Phoenix Urban Heat Island Study

Fifty spectral bands of calibrated radiance data were collected by the MODIS/ASTER Airborne Simulator (MASTER) instrument during five flights over Phoenix, Arizona, and Lake Mead, Nevada. The dataset includes georeferenced imagery at approximately 5-meter spatial resolution, covering wavelengths from visible to thermal infrared (0.460 to 12.879 micrometers). This deployment was coordinated by the U.S. Department of Energy's Remote Sensing Laboratory as part of a 2011 urban heat island investigation.

Use Cases

• Analyzing urban heat island intensity by examining thermal infrared radiance bands over Phoenix.
• Classifying land cover types using the 50 spectral bands spanning visible to long-wave infrared wavelengths.
• Validating satellite-derived surface temperature products with high-resolution (5m) airborne thermal data.
• Studying the spectral reflectance and emission properties of urban and water surfaces at Lake Mead.

Strengths

• Data includes calibrated radiance for 50 specific spectral bands, enabling detailed spectral analysis.
• Imagery has a high spatial resolution of approximately 5 meters, allowing for fine-scale feature observation.
• Collection covers a defined time period (July 11-16, 2011) for a controlled study of seasonal heat effects.

Limitations

• Primary data is stored in the legacy HDF-4 format, which may require specialized tools for access and processing.
• Conflicting metadata exists for the last updated date, with sources reporting 2011-07-16 and 2026-03-13.
• The exact number of image files, rows of data, and total dataset size are not specified across the platforms.

Provenance

Source

U.S. Department of Energy's Remote Sensing Laboratory (RSL) at Nellis Air Force Base.

Collection Method

Data collected by the MASTER instrument aboard a B-200 aircraft during five coordinated flights.

Time Range

2011-07-11 to 2011-07-16

Freshness

2026-03-13 00:48:32.247428

Geography

Phoenix, Arizona, and Lake Mead, Nevada, USA.