Support to multiband uncooled radiometer imager (MURI)

Principal Investigator(s)

John Kerekes and Aaron Gerace

Research Team Members

Cody Webber, Jared Gregor, Nina Raqueño, Rolando Raqueño

Project Description

This project is supporting the development of an airborne multiband infrared imaging instrument using an uncooled microbolometer array under funding from NASA’s Instrument Incubator Program (IIP). During AY 2018-19 efforts continued on studying the ability of the multiband instrument to detect enhanced levels of methane gas near the surface. This effort was pursued through the study of existing airborne longwave infrared imaging spectrometer data as well as through radiative transfer modeling using MODTRAN6. The figure to the right shows example results of the modeling study. This figure shows the sensitivity study of applying a detection algorithm to simulated data for the DRS multispectral instrument (MURI).

In addition, RIT has been preparing for a data validation collection experiment by creating simulated MURI data and temperature retrieval soft- ware to investigate the ability of MURI to retrieve surface temperature. The figure to the right shows a natural color visualization of a simulated thermal scene that will be acquired during the collection experiment. Airborne acquisitions will be coordinated with Landsat-8 overpasses for land sites as well as ocean buoys with the goal of comparing the temperature retrieval accuracy of MURI with that of Landsat-8 TIRS.

Project Status:

This project will end during academic year 2019- 20. During this final year additional modeling and analysis of validation data acquired during a data collection experiment will be performed to compare the capability of the airborne instrument with that of existing satellite sensors.

Figures and Images

A graph showing the ROC curves that show the probability of detection of pixels with enhanced levels of methane for the MURI instrument.

Receiver Operator Characteristic curves showing the probability of detection of pixels with enhanced levels of methane for the multispectral MURI instrument.

A DIRSIG simulated color image of Joint Forces Training Base Los Alamitos, CA.

DIRSIG simulated color image of Joint Forces Training Base Los Alamitos, CA, where a subset of the MURI validation experiments will be conducted. On the upper left an array
of simulated thermal targets can be seen which will provide data for verification of the temperature retrieval software.