European Facility for Airborne Research
EUFAR (www.eufar.net) is an Integrating Activity funded by the European Commission under FP5/FP6/FP7.
EUFAR works to coordinate the operation of instrumented aircraft and hyperspectral imaging sensors, exploiting the skills of experts in airborne measurements in the fields of environmental and geo-sciences, in order to provide researchers with the infrastructure best suited to their needs. EUFAR in FP7 joined with the HYRESSA (EU-FP6) hyperspectral community. The present EUFAR consortium is composed of 35 partners from 13 countries, among them 11 EU member states, Switzerland and Israel.
EUFAR activities consist of:
- Transnational access: The European Commission supports access to EUFAR research aircraft and instruments for your experiments (21 instrumented aircrafts, 6 hyperspectral imagers: APEX, ARES, CASI, Eagle, Hawk, AHS)
- Education and Training
- Expert Working groups
- Joint Research Activities (JRAs)
GFZ contributes to the EUFAR JRA2 -Quality layers for airborne hyperspectral imagery and data products (HYQUAPRO)- whose objectives are the development and implementation of quality indicators and quality layers for airborne hyperspectral imagery and higher level data products. Task 4 in JRA2 focuses on the development of higher performing water and soil algorithms as demonstrators for end-to-end processing chains with harmonized quality measures. GFZ is responsible for the soil algorithms.
GFZ tasks include:
- Delivery of soil products to users based on higher performing robust algorithms integrated in existing processing chains
- As a demonstrator, further improvement and implementation of existing algorithms for soil products to provide standardized data products, attractive to new users who do not have expertise or software
- The soil products will have to be tested and validated.
For this, GFZ is currently working on the development of the soil hyperspectral software HYSOMA (HYperspectral SOil MApper) whose first version and preliminary results where presented at the EUFAR Expert Working Group Soil applications Workshop: “Quantitative Applications of soil spectroscopy”, that was held in Potsdam, Germany, 15-16 April 2010.
