True surface colors over South Africa (aircraft mosaics)
What it measures. Detailed maps of true surface reflectance (the actual colors and brightness of the ground across many light wavelengths) over the Greater Cape Floristic Region of South Africa, at 5-meter detail.
How it's made. Captured by the AVIRIS-NG imaging spectrometer flown on an aircraft in late 2023, then resampled and stitched into a tiled mosaic of over 800 tiles.
How & where you'd use it. Supports mapping the region's rich plant biodiversity and studying different vegetation and land cover types in fine detail.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2023-10-22 → 2023-11-26
- Measured byG-III (AVIRIS-NG)
- Processing levelLevel 3
- Spatial extent17.624, -35.0059, 26.3231, -31.1561
- Formatsmultiple
- 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 holds mosaics of resampled surface reflectance from the Airborne Visible / Infrared Imaging Spectrometer-Next Generation (AVIRIS-NG) instrument for Biodiversity Survey of the Cape (BioSCape) project. AVIRIS-NG imagery was acquired in October - November 2023 over the Greater Cape Floristic Region (GCFR), South Africa. L2B surface reflectance data from these AVIRIS-NG collections were resampled to 5-m spatial resolution and mosaiced into a regular tile system of 807 tiles. A given tile includes multiple AVIRIS-NG scenes from multiple flight lines spanning multiple days. BioSCape is a multi-agency, NASA-led research project that integrates airborne imaging spectroscopy and lidar with a suite of measurements of biodiversity. The dataset includes surface reflectance with uncertainty for each tile in netCDF format along with an RGB quicklook image in TIFF format. A spatial index of mosaic grid ties is included in GeoJSON format.
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="BioSCape_ANG_V02_L3_RFL_Mosaic_2427",
version="2",
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. Official links
- Earthdata Search allows users to search, discover, visualize, refine, and access NASA Earth Observation data. GET DATA
- ORNL DAAC Data Set Documentation VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- BioSCape: AVIRIS-NG L3 Resampled Reflectance Mosaics, V2: BioSCape_ANG_V02_L3_RFL_Mosaic.pdf VIEW RELATED INFORMATION