The INTA AHS system

The Remote Sensing Laboratory at INTA owns and operates an 80-band airborne hyperspectral line-scanner radiometer, alias AHS. This instrument is based on previous airborne hyperspectral scanners as MIVIS and MAS. This instrument has been installed in the INTA´s aircraft (CASA C-212), and integrated with a GPS/INS. The acquired imagery is processed and archived by INTA. For this purpose, a processing chain has been implemented at the INTA premises in Madrid. In this chain, raw data (level 0 product) is transformed to at-sensor radiance (level 1b) and later to geolocated at-sensor radiance (level 1c). Other processing levels, as atmospherically corrected reflectance, brightness temperature or surface emissivity could also be produced. The radiometric calibration is based on laboratory measurements using an integrating sphere for the reflective bands, and on in-flight blackbodies measurements for the thermal bands. The geolocation procedure is based on processing of GPS/INS data synchronized with the imagery collection. Finally, direct parametric georeferencing is achieved by means of the commercial software PARGE. The resulting system is available to the international remote sensing community through specific agreements (contractual or based on joint collaborations). As an example of the use of this system, an on-going project to evaluate water stress in olives in southern Spain is presented. In this project, high resolution thermal radiometry is used to evaluate tree temperature, while reflective bands are used for identifying individual trees and for simultaneous monitoring of plant health.