Airborne prism experiment calibration information system

Abstract

The calibration of remote sensing instruments is a crucial step in the generation of products tied to international reference standards. Calibrating imaging spectrometers is particularly demanding due to the high number of spatiospectral pixels and, consequently, the large amount of data acquired during calibration sequences. Storage of these data and associated meta-data in an organized manner, as well as the provision of efficient tools for the data analysis and fast and repeatable calibration coefficient generation with provenance information, is key to the provision of traceable measurements. The airborne prism experiment (APEX) calibration information system is a multilayered information technology solution comprising a database based on the entity–attribute–value (EAV) paradigm and software written in Java and MATLAB, providing data access, visualization and processing, and handling the data volumes over the expected lifetime of the system. Although developed in the context of APEX, the system is rather generic and may be adapted to other pushbroom-based imagers with little effort.