Space

This study focuses on the urban area of Santa Barbara and Goleta, California that is characterized by a versatile mix of urban land cover types and surface materials including various categories of roofs and different road types and conditions. The hyperspectral remote sensing data from NASA-JPL’s Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) were acquired on June 9 th , 2000. The AVIRIS sensor records 224 spectral bands with a bandwidth of ~ 10 nm each, covering a spectral range from 350 to 2500 nm. The data set was acquired at a spatial resolution of approximately 4 meters, comparable to current high-resolution space-borne sensor systems like IKONOS. The data meet the generally proposed spatial resolution standard of less than 5 m for detailed urban area mapping (Welch 1982, Jensen and Cowen 1999), and the high spectral resolution lends itself well to comparative land cover mapping. The data were intensely processed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) for motion compensation and reduction of geometric distortions. The AVIRIS data were processed to apparent surface reflectance using a modified Modtran radiative transfer model (Green et al. 1993; Roberts et al. 1997) and adjusted using a ground reflectance target (Clark et al. 1993). The development of the AVIRIS urban spectral library was based on a comprehensive training dataset from ground observations and mapping that was developed for land cover classification mapping purposes (see Herold et al. 2003). The spectral library includes 26 different cover types and contains 956 individual spectra.