CHIME – Hyperspectral Imaging Mission: Value-added offered by PRISMA

Abstract:

The international scientific community and a large range of users are demanding for integrated operational mapping products and highlight the importance of using, and further developing monitoring services tailored to the user needs. CHIME is the European Copernicus Hyperspectral Imaging Mission for the Environment candidate to be added to the Copernicus Sentinels satellite fleet.

Requirements consolidation studies for future hyperspectral applications are now facing a unique opportunity thanks to the recent launch of the PRISMA, the scientific hyperspectral precursor. The PRISMA data availability allows to exploit the synergies between the future CHIME mission and the present PRISMA data and to explore the value added of the synergies with other existing missions in at least two application domains, “Agriculture/Food Security” and “Raw Material” and a set of algorithms for biogeophysical variables retrieval.

Three showcases, are discussed: for “Agriculture/Food Security”, the assessment of biophysical and biochemical variables related to the agronomy, (i) topsoil properties like soil organic content and soil texture; (ii) vegetation properties and phenology and for “Raw Material”, the (iii) mineral composition detection.

The methodology used to explore the hyperspectral value is based on an inclusive approach that integrates the Linear Spectral Mixture Analyses (LSMA) to improve the knowledge on the hyperspectral variability and other algorithms as selected to be CHIME High Priority Products (CHPPs) in order to evaluate the synergies among sensors

Sets of scatterplots between the LSMA and the CHPPs derived variables, provide the quantitative estimation of the hyperspectral contribution to the retrieval and a specific focus is dedicated at evaluating the relation of CHIME hyperspectral configurations with field hyperspectral data. The study provides feedback on the retrieval phase as well as it contains summaries of the major strength and weakness obtained in the vegetation, topsoil and raw material thematic area.