S-MODE PRISM: Airborne Ocean Radiance and Ancillary Data

PRISM airborne spectrometer data captures high-resolution ocean radiance for the Sub-Mesoscale Ocean Dynamics Experiment (S-MODE) IOP1 campaign. The dataset includes Level 1 radiance products from a pushbroom spectrometer (350-1050 nm) and a co-aligned SWIR radiometer (1240 nm, 1640 nm) for atmospheric correction, collected offshore of San Francisco in Fall 2022. It is designed to study how sub-mesoscale ocean dynamics influence vertical exchanges of physical and biological variables.

Use Cases

• Analyzing sub-mesoscale ocean feature dynamics based on high-resolution spatial imagery.
• Performing atmospheric correction of ocean color measurements using the co-aligned SWIR radiometer channels.
• Investigating vertical exchange processes by correlating spectral radiance with in-situ physical and biological data.
• Validating satellite-derived ocean color products with airborne data of higher spatial and temporal resolution.

Strengths

• Provides very high spatial resolution, capable of resolving features as small as 30 cm.
• Covers a broad spectral range from near-UV to near-IR (350-1050 nm) plus two specific SWIR bands for correction.
• Data is available on multiple authoritative platforms (NASA Earthdata, Data.gov), indicating curation and importance.

Limitations

• Column names and specific data structure are not provided in any source description.
• Metadata conflicts exist: one source lists a last update of 2026-04-09, while another lists 2023-05 10.
• The dataset size and row count are unknown across all platforms.

Provenance

Source

POCLOUD (as listed on NASA Earthdata)

Collection Method

Collected by the Portable Remote Imaging Spectrometer (PRISM) mounted on a GIII aircraft during the S-MODE IOP1 campaign.

Time Range

Fall 2022

Freshness

2026-04 09 22:52:14.248743

Geography

Approximately 300 km offshore of San Francisco, California, USA.