Preliminary activity for identification and characterization of an international CAL/VAL site

Riassunto

During the four years Italian Space Agency (ASI) funded project “ASI-AGI” (Analisi Sistemi Iperspettrali per le Applicazioni Geofisiche Integrate) INGV has developed specific algorithms and products for various geophysical applications to be applied on hyperspectral data that will be acquired during lifetime of the next ASI-PRISMA (Precursore IperSpettrale della Missione Applicativa). PRISMA is a pre-operative small Italian hyperspectral mission aiming to observe routinely and to characterize the earth surface by coupling an hyperspectral and a panchromatic sensor. In this context ASI-AGI project contributes to develop applications and provides products to institutional and scientific users for environmental observation and risk management. Moreover the identification of a CAL/VAL site is a direct interest of European Space Agency (ESA) in the framework of the Committee on Earth Observation Satellite (CEOS) actions. The scope of this project is to select, identify and characterise test sites, to be used as a reference, for the calibration and characterisation of different sensor types and identifying and characterizing test sites that can be used for external calibration. The project is part of the ESA strategy for ensuring the quality (in terms of calibration, validation and operational quality) of data developed for current and future missions within the Explorers and he European Earth observation programme Copernicus, previously known as GMES (Global Monitoring Environment and Security) framework. The choice of a sites or the use of a site depends on the nature of the space mission (ocean color, terrestrial biosphere), by the sensor resolution (high medium or low spatial resolution), and then on the needs to...