MASTER Airborne Imagery for California Wildfire and Farmland Mapping

July 2004 data from two NASA ER-2 flights over California captures calibrated radiance across 50 spectral bands from 0.460 to 12.879 micrometers. The dataset includes Level 1B georeferenced imagery at ~50-meter resolution and derived Level 2 products for emissivity and land surface temperature. NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center coordinated this deployment for mapping farmland and recent wildfire sites.

Use Cases

• Mapping post-fire land surface temperature using L2 thermal infrared emissivity bands.
• Analyzing crop health and farmland characteristics with 50-band L1B calibrated radiance imagery.
• Validating satellite-derived land surface temperature models with airborne sensor data.
• Studying spectral reflectance across visible to thermal infrared wavelengths for land cover classification.
• Integrating flight path and instrument configuration metadata for geospatial analysis workflows.

Strengths

• Provides data from 50 spectral bands, offering detailed spectral coverage from visible to thermal infrared wavelengths.
• Includes both raw calibrated radiance (L1B) and derived geophysical products like land surface temperature (L2).
• Covers two specific flights on July 20-21, 2004, providing a focused temporal snapshot for targeted analysis.

Limitations

• Platforms disagree on the last updated date: Data.gov lists 2026-03 13, while NASA Earthdata lists 2004-07-21.
• Key metadata such as row count, file size, and specific column names are not provided across all sources.
• Spatial coverage is limited to the specific flight paths over California during the two-day deployment.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

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

Time Range

2004-07-20 to 2004-07-21

Freshness

2026-03-13 00:57:19.706436

Geography

California, U.S.