Airborne Research Facility for the Earth System

Research Team

Andreas Hueni
Michael E. Schaepman

Summary

ARES is an airborne research facility to predominantly address research questions within the Earth System Sciences.

The main components of ARES are:

• - an aircraft, leased or contracted during flight periods,
• - an instrument package consisting of an imaging spectrometer (IS), a multispectral LiDAR, and a high-performance photogrammetric camera (hpPC),
• - a flight management, instrument control and navigational system giving attitude and positional information allowing an automated georectification of data products

ARES data will generally be made available to the user community as open access.

The goal of this four year project is to establish the ARES infrastructure, including purchase/development of hardware and software, integration of the components, airworthiness certifications, acceptance tests and establishment of payload specific processing and archiving facilities.

ARES will facilitate the acquisition of high accuracy data with high temporal stability, thus enabling the analysis of time series and addressing the monitoring of small changes in environmental variables within the framework of the GCB.