Geotagged aerial photos over African forests (AfriSAR)

In plain English

What it measures. Aerial photographs taken over forests in Gabon, Africa, each tagged with its location.

How it's made. Captured by NASA's Digital Mapping Camera paired with an airborne laser-scanning lidar (LVIS), flown during the joint NASA-ESA AfriSAR campaign.

How & where you'd use it. Provides visual reference imagery to accompany the lidar measurements of African forests used in vegetation and carbon studies.

What's measured

SPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › VISIBLE WAVELENGTHS › VISIBLE IMAGERY

Coverage & cadence

Time span2016-02-20 → 2016-03-08
Measured byB-200 (LVIS-Camera) · C-130 (LVIS-Camera) · DC-8 (LVIS-Camera) · G-V (LVIS-Camera) · HU-25C (LVIS-Camera) · P-3B (LVIS-Camera) · RQ-4 (LVIS-Camera)
Processing levelLevel 1A
Spatial extent8, -2, 12, 1
FormatsJPEG
StatusCOMPLETE

What you can do with it

Track deforestation, fire scars and land-cover change
Monitor crop and vegetation health (NDVI/EVI)
Map how built-up vs. green an area is over time

Official description

This data set contains geotagged images collected over Gabon, Africa. The images were taken by the NASA Digital Mapping Camera paired with the Land, Vegetation, and Ice Sensor (LVIS), an airborne lidar scanning laser altimeter. The data were collected as part of a NASA campaign, in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) mission AfriSAR.

Get the data

afolvis1a_access.py

import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="AFOLVIS1A",
    version="1",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from NSIDC_CPRD

Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.

What's measured

Coverage & cadence

What you can do with it

Get the data

Official links