NEON Airborne Observation Platform Takes Flight Again

June 13, 2024

Photo of plane landing at Boulder airport

It’s that time of the year: The NEON Airborne Observation Platform (AOP) has begun the 2024 airborne remote sensing season. Each year between March and October, the aircraft perform survey flights over a subset of the NEON field sites. Here are some fun facts about the AOP and some photos taken by the AOP teams during previous remote sensing surveys.

This year, surveys will be conducted at field sites representing 10 NEON Domains, including the Northeast (D01), Southeast (D03), Great Lakes (D05), Prairie Peninsula (D06), Ozarks Complex (D08), Central Plains (D10), Southern Plains (D11), Southern Rockies/Colorado Plateau (D13), Pacific Southwest (D17), and Taiga (D19). See the full 2024 Airborne Operations Schedule here.

Remote Sensing FAQs

What Is the NEON Airborne Operation Platform?

The NEON AOP consists of remote sensing instrument packages carried by a Twin Otter aircraft. NEON operates three payloads that include:

Discrete and full-waveform lidar
An imaging spectrometer
A high-resolution digital camera

Together, these instruments provide a rich and detailed characterization of the landscape, with data products that can be used to understand the three-dimensional structure of vegetation, land cover types, chemical content of vegetation, and much more.

When Is Remote Sensing Conducted?

Remote sensing data are collected over both terrestrial and aquatic field sites at peak greenness—the time of year when vegetation is at its most lush and verdant. This period varies across different regions of the United States due to differences in climate, elevation, and local ecosystems. In general, southern locations reach peak greenness earlier than northern locations, and higher elevations experience leaf-out and greenness later than lower elevations. The flight schedules are carefully planned months in advance to catch each Domain at its greenest.

How Often Are NEON Field Sites Surveyed by the AOP?

Remote sensing data are collected at field sites in the continental U.S. and Alaska at a minimum of three out of every five years and in Puerto Rico and Hawaii every five years.

Where Can I Find Remote Sensing Data?

In the NEON Data Portal, of course! The AOP produces 29 NEON data products from the three sensors, including Lidar (discrete return lidar point cloud data, lidar slant range waveform, ecosystem structure (CHM), elevation, slope and aspect), Spectrometer (at-sensor radiance, surface reflectance, albedo, fPAR, LAI, canopy water indices, and vegetation indices), and Camera (high-res orthorectified camera imagery). In Spring of 2024, the AOP started generating topographic and BRDF-corrected surface reflectance for sites collected in 2022 and after, and derived reflectance data products (eg. the L2 and L3 indices) will now be derived from these bidirectional reflectance data. For information on this new bidirectional dataset, and the differences, please refer to the tutorial “Introduction to Bidirectional Hyperspectral Reflectance Data in Python.”

This Is Pretty Cool—Can I Request a flight survey?

Yes! The AOP payloads are available on a cost-recoverable basis as part of our research support services. Two of the AOP payloads are used for field site surveys each year, while the third is reserved as a backup for NEON operations or for Assignable Assets Program requests. Contact us to learn more!