Adaptation of the Diffused Matrix Image Format to Store Simulated Data from FLEX / Sentinel-3 Future ESA Missions

FLEX and Sentinel-3 are two missions currently developed by ESA. The images obtained by the three sensors built for these missions (OLCI, SLSTR and FIMAS) will be optimized to exploit the synergism for fluorescence information retrieval. The acquisition geometries of such sensors are significantly different in several aspects. Firstly, their technologies differ, since the OLCI and FIMAS sensors are push-broom imaging spectrometers, whereas the SLSTR sensor is a scanning radiometer. Secondly, their morphologies are also different, since both sensors have different data resolutions. These differences are also present even if only images acquired from the same orbit are selected. In these situations, the extracted multi-sensor and multi-temporal information will present a much lower effective spatial resolution (in the case of homogeneous areas) or completely wrong information (in the case of heterogeneous areas). To address these matters this paper analyses the use of a variation of the Diffused Matrix Format (DMF) methodology to correctly store and geo-correct the OLCI, SLSTR, and FIMAS temporal time series. The DMF structure is composed by basic records that store all the information for each measurement acquired by the sensors, such as coordinate location, data, sensor identification and acquisition timestamp.