Vegetation Canopy Lidar Field Experiments

The VCL science team is conducting a series of flights in September and October 1999 with the LVIS instrument. The instrument is mounted onboard a NASA C-130 aircraft. East Coast flights will be based at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, Va. West Coast flights will be based at Yosemite International Airport, Fresno, Calif.

The upcoming U.S. flights will map several different forest types. Data from these flights will be compared with forest data collected from the ground. Previous LVIS flights have successfully mapped rain forests in Costa Rica.

On the East Coast, LVIS will be flown over three forests on three separate days. Two of the target forests are Long-Term Ecological Research sites funded by the National Science Foundation. The Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in the White Mountain National Forest near Woodstock, New Hampshire, is mostly deciduous broad-leaved forest with some evergreen needle-leaved forest at higher elevations. The Coweeta Hydrological Laboratory in the Appalachian Mountains at the intersection of North Carolina, Georgia, and South Carolina has mostly deciduous broad-leaved forest with some evergreen needle-leaved forest on the drier ridges. The third area is in Maryland's Patuxent River watershed between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, where VCL researchers have collected extensive ground-based forest measurements. An approximately 40-square-mile section of each forest will be mapped.

On the West Coast, LVIS will make 4 or 5 flights to map a single 200-square-mile area northeast of Fresno, Calif., in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. This area contains semi-evergreen broad-leaved woodland and evergreen needle-leaved woodland. The target area begins about 20 miles north of Fresno and runs 60 miles to the southeast through the Sierra and Sequoia National Forests and Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park.

The current flight schedule (subject to change) is September 22-26 1999 for the East Coast forests, and September 30-October 8 1999 for the California forests.

Vegetation Canopy Lidar Mission

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