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Full catalog/AVUELO_AV3_L2A_Reflectance_2479
AVUELO_AV3_L2A_Reflectance_2479·v1·dataset

True surface colors from an aircraft sensor

AVUELO AVIRIS-3 Orthocorrected Surface Reflectance (provisional calibration)
land NASA ORNL_CLOUD Level 2 netCDF-4
In plain English

What it measures. Detailed 'true color' surface reflectance of land and shallow water in Panama and Costa Rica, recorded across hundreds of narrow color bands from visible light into shortwave infrared. In plain terms, it captures the fine fingerprint of colors each surface reflects, plus an estimate of how uncertain each reading is.

How it's made. Collected by the AVIRIS-3 imaging spectrometer flown on a King Air aircraft in early 2025, then corrected for the atmosphere to show colors as they would appear at the ground (using a provisional, not-yet-final calibration).

How & where you'd use it. Used to test and improve satellite hyperspectral instruments and to study tropical forests and coastal waters in fine spectral detail; because it is provisional and specialized, it serves mainly researchers rather than the general public.

What's measured

LAND SURFACE › SURFACE RADIATIVE PROPERTIES › REFLECTANCE

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2025-02-06 → 2025-02-28
  • Measured byKing Air (AVIRIS-3)
  • Processing levelLevel 2
  • Spatial extent-85.7053, 7.14833, -79.3211, 10.9103
  • FormatsnetCDF-4
  • 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 dataset contains Level 2A (L2A) orthocorrected surface reflectance and uncertainty estimates from the Airborne Visible / Infrared Imaging Spectrometer-3 (AVIRIS-3) instrument acquired for the Airborne Validation Unified Experiment: Land to Ocean (AVUELO) project in 2025. This L2A data product was generated with a provisional calibration algorithm. AVUELO aims to advance the validation and calibration of spaceborne imaging spectroscopy (hyperspectral) data for tropical ecosystems by combining airborne imaging spectroscopy for terrestrial and marine sites in Panama and Costa Rica with contemporaneous field measurements and data collected in February 2025. The NASA AVIRIS-3 is a spectral mapping system that measures reflected radiance at ~7.4-nm intervals in the Visible to Shortwave Infrared (VSWIR) spectral range from 390-2500 nm. The AVIRIS-3 sensor has a 40 degree instantaneous field of view with 1,234 pixels, providing altitude dependent ground sampling distances from 12 m to sub meter range. This spectrometer measures radiance from surface and atmosphere and is identical in design to the orbital Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) spectrometer. AVIRIS-3 was deployed on a King Air aircraft. Surface hemispherical directional reflectance was derived from calibrated radiance using an optimal estimation algorithm. For each flight scene, two file types are included: orthocorrected surface reflectance (RFL_ORT) and orthocorrected reflectance uncertainty (UNC_ORT) in netCDF format. Both file types include data projected in a UTM coordinate system. When available, a version 2 calibration Level 2A (L2A) of orthocorrected surface reflectance and uncertainty data for these same flight lines will be available in an AVIRIS-3 L2A Orthocorrected Surface Reflectance, Facility Instrument Collection, Version 2.

Get the data

avuelo_av3_l2a_reflectance_2479_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="AVUELO_AV3_L2A_Reflectance_2479",
    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_CLOUD
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.