Airborne Laser Scanner Data Repository and Processing Portal for the ARES Observatory
Category
Explore
Institutions
EPFL
Data type
Laser scanner data
Field
Earth sciences
Researchers
Skaloud, Jan
Description
This project aims to establish an open database facilitating visualization, sharing and transparent processing of airborne laser scanning (ALS) data that are concurrently collected and disseminated on remote-sensing missions with a new airborne image spectrometer, called AVIRIS-4, developed by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for a consortium of Swiss research institutes (ARES). After obtaining an airworthiness (authority approval) for concurrent operations of this spectrometer with airborne laser scanner (ALS) in 5.2025, 13 missions of AVIRIS-4 have been flown with both instruments on-board, and more prospective missions are planned in 2026. This is expected to significantly increase the richness and the value of the information collected for remote sensing. This potential can, however, be only fully exploited if the data from both instruments are perfectly spatially aligned. This requirement is traditionally difficult to control in ALS data, where many processing stages depend on either proprietary or system-specific software. This project strives to overcome this barrier and make all involved observations available in open formats, together with related metadata as well as the baseline output at each processing stage, to enable the treatment of data at all levels with either existing open tools, or endorse new developments for joint integration of all observation sources within one optimization and verifiable quality control.