Optical satellite and manned aircraft remote sensing

Techniques based on drone images can also be applied using optical satellite and manned aircraft imagery, typically with lower spatial resolution but larger coverage capability. NORCE have for example used Sentinel-2 optical imagery for snow avalanche detection on Greenland as a supplement to Sentinel-1 SAR data.

In Svalbard, NORCE has installed and tested a suite of optical imaging sensors on the Lufttransport Dornier aircraft stationed in Longyearbyen as part of the Svalbard Integrated Arctic Earth Observing System (SIOS) (https://sios-svalbard.org/research_aircraft). The aircraft is configured to acquire aerial imagery and hyperspectral remote sensing data in addition to its normal transport operation. The round-trip range of the aircraft is 2400 km, which enables a variety of geoscientific applications around Svalbard.