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