ARES Products Over Lägern Mountain

Source: created by Dr. Felix Morsdorf (Remote Sensing Laboratories, UZH), background image by Federal Office of Topography swisstopo

This visual over the ca. 10 km long Lägern mountain shows exemplary ARES products. ARES is a brand-new, state of the art Airborne Research Facility for the Earth System (ARES). In its final set up, it will feature three different sensors: a) an imaging spectrometer (AVIRIS-4), b) a full waveform LiDAR, and c) a photogrammetric camera.

What we see here, from left to right: False Color Infrared of the city of Baden, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (blue is low activity, greenish to yellow high activity), Chlorophyll/Carotenoid Index, Chlorophyll Index – Red-Edge, Normalized Difference Water Index, Canopy Height, Plant Area Index, Foliage Height Diversity and, to round it off, another False Color Infrared over the town of Dielsdorf.

The AVIRIS-4 sensor head was engineered and built by NASA/JPL, while the flight hardware and software were developed by UZH and ZHAW. The first test flight of AVIRIS-4 was carried out in February 2024, with a Cessna Caravan EX aircraft. This imaging spectrometer offers unprecedented radiometric and spectral stability, by being operated within a vacuum vessel and thermally regulated to within 100mK. A very similar instrument is currently active on the outside of the International Space Station (ISS), and goes by the name of EMIT (Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation). As the name suggests, EMIT maps the mineral composition of arid dust source regions via imaging spectroscopy in the visible and short-wave infrared range. The source regions' maps will be used to model the role of mineral dust in the warming or cooling of the atmosphere.