MASTER Airborne Multispectral Imagery of California Fall 2020

Nine NASA ER-2 flights collected 50-band multispectral imagery over California from September 17 to October 15, 2020. The dataset provides Level 1B calibrated radiance and Level 2 derived products like land surface temperature and emissivity. Data from the MODIS/ASTER Airborne Simulator supports the Western Diversity Time Series program for ecosystem and disaster monitoring.

Use Cases

• Classifying vegetation type and health using 50 spectral bands from visible to thermal infrared wavelengths.
• Mapping land surface temperature from derived L2 products to study urban heat islands or drought impacts.
• Benchmarking ecosystem state for change detection against future satellite data like from HyspIRI.
• Analyzing spatial patterns of calibrated radiance at approximately 50-meter resolution for specific flight areas.
• Assessing natural disaster impacts such as wildfire scars or volcanic activity using thermal infrared data.

Strengths

• Contains data from nine separate airborne campaigns, providing spatial coverage across selected California areas.
• Includes both raw calibrated radiance (L1B) and scientifically derived products like emissivity and land surface temperature (L2).
• Covers a broad spectral range from 0.460 to 12.879 micrometers across 50 bands for detailed material discrimination.

Limitations

• Spatial resolution is approximately 50 meters, which may be coarse for some fine-scale ecological studies.
• Sources conflict on the last updated date, with one listing 2026-03-13 and another listing 2020-10 15.
• Specific row counts, file sizes, and detailed column names are not provided across the platforms.

Provenance

Source

NASA ORNL_CLOUD via the MODIS/ASTER Airborne Simulator (MASTER) instrument.

Collection Method

Data collected during nine flights aboard a NASA ER-2 aircraft as part of the Western Diversity Time Series (WDTS) program.

Time Range

2020-09-17 to 2020-10-15

Freshness

2026-03-13 00:57:00.093081

Geography

Selected areas of California, USA.