True surface colors from an airborne imager (AVIRIS-NG)
What it measures. Detailed maps of the true colors of the ground, captured from an aircraft. For every spot it records how strongly the surface reflects light across hundreds of narrow color bands from visible through shortwave-infrared, after removing the haze and distortion of the atmosphere.
How it's made. Collected by the AVIRIS-NG imaging spectrometer flown on aircraft such as the Twin Otter, King Air, and high-flying ER-2, then corrected for terrain and atmosphere into surface-reflectance images.
How & where you'd use it. Used to identify and map what's on the ground in fine detail, from vegetation types to minerals to water, supporting a wide range of NASA science and applications.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2014-06-21 → ongoing
- Measured byNOAA Twin Otter (AVIRIS-NG) · NASA ER-2 (AVIRIS-NG) · DHC-6 (AVIRIS-NG) · B-200 (AVIRIS-NG)
- Processing levelLevel 2
- Spatial extent-166.652, 9.19806, 88.8094, 84.356
- FormatsENVI
- StatusACTIVE
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 dataset contains Level 2 (L2) orthocorrected reflectance from the Airborne Visible / Infrared Imaging Spectrometer-Next Generation (AVIRIS-NG) instrument. This is the NASA Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) facility instrument archive of these data. The AVIRIS-NG is a pushbroom spectral mapping system with high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), designed and toleranced for high performance spectroscopy. AVIRIS-NG measures reflected radiance at 5-nm intervals in the Visible to Shortwave Infrared (VSWIR) spectral range from 380-2510 nm. The AVIRIS-NG sensor has a 1 milliradian instantaneous field of view, providing altitude dependent ground sampling distances from 20 m to sub-meter range. For each flight line, two types of L2 data files may be included: (a) calibrated surface reflectance and (b) water vapor and optical absorption paths for liquid water and ice. The L2 data are provided in ENVI format, which includes a flat binary file accompanied by a header (.hdr) file holding metadata in text format. The AVIRIS-NG is flown on a variety of aircraft platforms including the Twin Otter, the King Air B-200, and NASA's high altitude ER-2. This archive currently includes data from 2014 - 2022. Additional AVIRIS-NG facility instrument L2 data will be added as they become available. The AVIRIS-NG supports NASA Science and applications in many areas including plant composition and function, geology and soils, greenhouse gas mapping, and calibration of orbital platforms.
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="AVIRIS-NG_L2_Reflectance_2110",
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 ORNL_CLOUDBrowsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.