Assessing Plant Canopy Energy Balance, Evapotranspiration, and Vegetation Stress with 3D Surface Temperatures Derived from New G-LiHT TIR Imagery

The drivers and responses of vegetation three-dimensional structure and functioning to ongoing global change, land-use, and altered disturbance regimes is not well understood, but play an important role in regulating land-atmosphere interactions and ecosystem-atmosphere exchange of CO2, CH4, heat and water vapor. A critical uncertainty relates to the complex interplay between vegetation structure and the emergent functioning and surface energy balance over space and time. To address this critical knowledge gap, we will leverage the NASA Goddard’s Lidar, Hyperspectral and Thermal (G-LiHT) multi-sensor airborne instrument package, as a sensor fusion testbed for developing novel 3D fusion products from stereo dense point clouds and state-of-the-art, multiangle thermal infrared (TIR) imaging. This proposed project is aligned well with the ongoing push within NASA to create novel observing systems through multi-sensor fusion and “System of Systems” approaches, and would provide important connections with the virtual constellation of NASA’s current and planned land-based VSWIR, TIR and lidar-based missions (e.g., Landsat 8/9/Next, ECOSTRESS, EMIT, SBG, GEDI, ICESat-2) and new missions based of the breakthrough science of this new 3D data analysis technique.

Understanding the interplay between vegetation structure and the emergent functioning and surface energy balance over space and time.

This is a mature technology (TRL 7) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

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