Development of airborne remote sensing instrumentations for NEON

Airborne remote sensing plays a critical role in the scaling strategy underpinning the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) design. Airborne spectroscopy and waveform LiDAR will quantify plant species type and function, and vegetation structure and heterogeneity at the scale of individual shrubs and larger plants (1-3 meters) over hundreds of square kilometers. Panchromatic photography at better than 30 cm resolution will retrieve fine-scale information regarding land use, roads, impervious surfaces, and built structures. NEON will build three airborne systems to allow for routine coverage of NEON sites (60 sites nationally) and the capacity to respond to investigator requests for specific projects. The system design achieves a balance between performance, and development cost and risk. The approach takes full advantage of existing commercial airborne LiDAR and camera components. However, requirements for the spectrometer represent a significant advancement in technology. A pushbroom imaging spectrometer design is being proposed to simultaneously achieve high spatial, spectral and signal-to-noise ratio and a high degree of uniformity in response across wavelength and a wide field of view. To reduce risk during NEON construction, a spectrometer design verification unit is under development by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to demonstrate that the design and component technologies meet operational and performance requirements. This paper presents an overview of system design, key requirements and development status of the NEON airborne instrumentation.