Prospects and Limitations of Imaging Spectroscopy for Environmental Applications

Imaging spectrometer record continuous reflectance and emission spectra in high spectral resolution and consequently resolve individual absorption bands which would remain undetected in broad-band multispectral imagery. Such data therefore nicely complements data from other sensor modalities such as multi-spectral scanner, Radar and Lidar. Unfortunately, however, the current temporal revisit frequency is insufficient as only a few orbital platforms have been launched.

In my talk, I will show a few successful applications derived from hyperspectral data cubes. This will include examples using both empirical approaches as well as physical-based approaches. I will discuss limitations of both approaches when analyzing data from imaging spectrometer with a particular focus on the ill-posed inverse problem, model transferability, as well as epistemic uncertainty as a result of model over-simplifications. I will conclude by presenting some recent progress in solving these issues.