Flight Schedules and Coverage

The NEON flight season typically runs from March to October each year. Remote sensing data are collected over aquatic and terrestrial field sites during peak greeness for each site. While preliminary data collection started in 2013, the standard schedule for full operations of the AOP began in 2018. Under the current plan, data are collected from field sites in the continental U.S. and Alaska three years out of every five, and in Puerto Rico and Hawaii every five years. The data are processed after each survey and made available via the NEON data portal.

2019 Flight Schedule

Last updated February 21, 2019

Curious about where and when we have collected AOP data since 2013? Check out the workbook below.If you are interested in tracking the 2019 season, sign up to receive daily flight report emails by NEON domain or visit our flight report archive. Please note, you will only receive emails during the time period the AOP is in the domain you have signed up to follow.

Flight Coverage

At each terrestrial site a minimum of 100 km² will be surveyed over an area encompassing the NEON flux tower airsheds and distributed long-term observational sampling plots, representative vegetation types, and watershed boundaries for both terrestrial and aquatics sites. To minimize signal uncertainty due to plant phenology and to ensure spatial and temporal consistency in data products across multiple years, all terrestrial sites are scheduled to be flown during mean peak greenness, defined as the range of dates where MODIS NDVI is within 90% of the site maximum. To minimize atmospheric effects, data acquisition occurs at less than 10% cloud cover. 

Collection of AOP data is also synchronized with data collected on the ground at each site. This allows scientists to develop a more comprehensive picture of how different observations scale and how measurements taken from airborne remote sensing instruments correlate with observations made on the ground.