Abstract
Since 2015, NASA’s Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) has investigated how climate change impacts the vulnerability and/or resilience of the permafrost-affected ecosystems of Alaska and northwestern Canada. ABoVE conducted extensive surveys with the Next Generation Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS-NG) during 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2022 and with AVIRIS-3 in 2023 to characterize tundra, taiga, peatlands, and wetlands in unprecedented detail. The ABoVE AVIRIS dataset comprises ~1700 individual flight lines covering ~120,000 km2 with nominal 5 m × 5 m spatial resolution. Data include individual transects to capture important gradients like the tundra-taiga ecotone and maps of up to 10,000 km2 for key study areas like the Mackenzie Delta. The ABoVE AVIRIS surveys enable diverse ecosystem science, provide crucial benchmark data for validating retrievals from the PACE, PRISMA, and EnMAP satellite sensors and help prepare for the SBG and CHIME missions. This paper guides interested researchers to fully explore the ABoVE AVIRIS spectral imagery and complements our guide to the ABoVE airborne synthetic aperture radar surveys.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 692 |
| Journal | Scientific Data |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 2025 |
Funding
The ABoVE AVIRIS data acquisitions would not have been possible without the enthusiasm and tireless support of Dynamic Aviation, our N53W pilots, and flight crews. We also thank the instrument scientists, operators, and data processing team from the JPL Imaging Spectroscopy Group (328B) who were essential to the successful execution of these experiments and rapid processing of the resulting data products. The field work supporting the AVIRIS campaigns was made possible by outstanding support from Dan Hodkinson, Sarah Sackett, and the ABoVE Logistics Office. Finally, we thank the data curation team at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center for their support and expert advice. In memoriam: AVIRIS instrument operator Scott Nolte. This work was supported by the NASA Terrestrial Ecology Program’s Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE). P.T., K.K., R.P. and C.E.M. acknowledge support for their contributions from NASA Terrestrial Ecology Program awards 80NSSC19M0115 and 80NSSC22K1250. A portion of this work was performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). Government funding acknowledged. The ABoVE AVIRIS data acquisitions would not have been possible without the enthusiasm and tireless support of Dynamic Aviation, our N53W pilots, and flight crews. We also thank the instrument scientists, operators, and data processing team from the JPL Imaging Spectroscopy Group (328B) who were essential to the successful execution of these experiments and rapid processing of the resulting data products. The field work supporting the AVIRIS campaigns was made possible by outstanding support from Dan Hodkinson, Sarah Sackett, and the ABoVE Logistics Office. Finally, we thank the data curation team at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center for their support and expert advice. In memoriam: AVIRIS instrument operator Scott Nolte. This work was supported by the NASA Terrestrial Ecology Program’s Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE). P.T., K.K., R.P. and C.E.M. acknowledge support for their contributions from NASA Terrestrial Ecology Program awards 80NSSC19M0115 and 80NSSC22K1250. A portion of this work was performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). Government funding acknowledged.