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Full catalog/SHIFT_HyTES_L1_2022_2245
SHIFT_HyTES_L1_2022_2245·v1·dataset

Airborne thermal infrared brightness (California, 2022)

SHIFT: HyTES L1 Brightness Temperature, March 23 2022
land NASA ORNL_CLOUD Level 1B multiple
In plain English

What it measures. Airborne snapshots of how warm surfaces looked in thermal infrared—essentially the heat-glow of the land and nearby ocean—across part of Santa Barbara County, California, on a single day in March 2022.

How it's made. Captured by the HyTES thermal imaging spectrometer flown on a Twin Otter aircraft, processed to a Level 1 stage with location info for each pixel across 91 flight scenes.

How & where you'd use it. A starting point for measuring land surface temperature, which feeds into tracking how plants and soil lose water (evapotranspiration), spotting evaporative cooling, and even detecting air pollution sources.

What's measured

SPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › INFRARED WAVELENGTHS › BRIGHTNESS TEMPERATURE

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2022-03-23 → 2022-03-23
  • Measured byNOAA Twin Otter (HyTES)
  • Processing levelLevel 1B
  • Spatial extent-120.603, 34.18, -118.784, 34.8859
  • 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 Level 1 (L1) brightness temperature data collected by the Hyperspectral Thermal Emission Spectrometer (HyTES) instrument. This imagery was acquired as part of the Surface Biology and Geology High-Frequency Time Series (SHIFT) campaign on March 23, 2022. The SHIFT campaign generated precise, high-frequency data on plant communities for nearly 1,656 square kilometers across Santa Barbara County, California, US, and the nearby ocean. HyTES is a compact image spectrometer that acquires data in 256 spectral bands between 7.5 and 12 micrometers; it was deployed on a Twin Otter aircraft. The SHIFT campaign sought to demonstrate the joint use of both VSWIR and thermal infrared (TIR) data. TIR data are used to measure land surface temperature (LST), which informs models of water flux from land surface through processes such as evapotranspiration. LST is sensitive to solar heat gains and local cooling effects due to evaporative cooling. The HyTES instrument measures TIR radiances that can be used to derive LST, emissivity and Level 3 products such as latent heat flux and detection of air pollution sources. The HyTES data are provided in HDF5 format and include 91 flight scenes. The data are not projected, but georeferencing information for each pixel are provided in the HDF5 and a separate ENVI file for each flight scene. In addition, the flight scene boundaries and an overlay image are provided in Keyhole Markup Language (KML) along with a quicklook image and spectral response data.

Get the data

shift_hytes_l1_2022_2245_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="SHIFT_HyTES_L1_2022_2245",
    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.