AVIRIS Flightlines in Google Earth
I’ve made a Google Earth-compatible .kmz file with all the AVIRIS flightline locations from 2000 to 2006, as listed on the AVIRIS website. Google Earth is a painless and speedy (and free) way to get a sense of the landscape sensed in each imagery dataset.
AVIRIS is the Airborne Visible InfraRed Imaging Spectrometer, NASA JPL’s airplane-mounted hyperspectral imaging sensor.
download: AvirisFlightlines.kmz
No lines, only points
Only the start and stop location for each flightline is reported, as points. I haven’t taken the useful next step of creating lines for each flightline.
Labelling and attributes
Each stop and start point is labelled using the descriptive “site name” assigned to that flightline or collection of flightlines, e.g. “White-Inyo Range 1”. If you left-click on an icon, it will reveal the other information from the quicklooks index, including the official flight number, e.g. “f000613t01p03_r05”.
Errors
There are a large number of uncorrected errors in the index. I haven’t carefully assessed the index for processing mistakes, but there are obvious failings in the quicklooks records it was created from. For instance, there is a substantial band of locations along the Greenwich Meridian corresponding to missing or broken longitude entries.
2000 to 2006
The index is broken up by year, and only covers from 2000 too 2006. Previous to 2000, JPL reports the start and stop locations in Degree Minute Second format, instead of Decimal Degrees. Flightlines subsequent to 2006 are not yet listed.
Processing
The index tables for each set of quicklooks preview imagery were copied and pasted into a text file. Spaces were replaced with commas, and the files was saved as .csv format. The cvs2kml utility was used to convert the .csv files into Google Earth-compatible .kml files. The .kml files for each year were renamed, adjusted for appearance and aggregated into a single .kmz file.
last updated June 2008