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    • Virtual Sensors: Efficiently Estimating Missing Spectra

    Metadata Updated: August 30, 2025

    Various instruments are used to create images of the Earth and other objects in the universe in a diverse set of wavelength bands with the aim of understanding natural phenomena. Sometimes these instruments are built in a phased approach, with additional measurement capabilities added in later phases. In other cases, technology may mature to the point that the instrument offers new measurement capabilities that were not planned in the original design of the instrument. In still other cases, high resolution spectral measurements may be too costly to perform on a large sample and therefore lower resolution spectral instruments are used to take the majority of measurements. Many applied science questions that are relevant to the earth science remote sensing community require analysis of enormous amounts of data that were generated by instruments with disparate measurement capabilities. This paper addresses this problem using Virtual Sensors: a method that uses modelstrained on spectrally rich (high spectral resolution) data to "fill in" unmeasured spectral channels in spectrally poor (low spectral resolution) data. The models we use in this paper are Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs), Support Vector Machines (SVMs) with Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernels and SVMs with Mixture Density Mercer Kernels (MDMK). We demonstrate this method by using models trained on the high spectral resolution Terra MODIS instrument to estimate what the equivalent of the MODIS 1.6 micron channel would be for the NOAA AVHRR/2 instrument. The scientific motivation for the simulation of the 1.6 micron channel is to improve the ability of the AVHRR/2 sensor to detect clouds over snow and ice.

    Access & Use Information

    Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

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    Dates

    Metadata Created Date November 12, 2020
    Metadata Updated Date August 30, 2025
    Data Update Frequency irregular

    Metadata Source

    Harvested from NASA Data.json

    Other Data Resources

    Additional Metadata

    Resource Type Dataset
    Metadata Created Date November 12, 2020
    Metadata Updated Date August 30, 2025
    Publisher Dashlink
    Maintainer
    Identifier DASHLINK_193
    Data First Published 2010-09-22
    Data Last Modified 2025-03-31
    Public Access Level public
    Data Update Frequency irregular
    Bureau Code 026:00
    Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
    Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
    Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
    Harvest Object Id 927550c7-46a6-464f-b459-c4dd18f1557b
    Harvest Source Id 58f92550-7a01-4f00-b1b2-8dc953bd598f
    Harvest Source Title NASA Data.json
    Homepage URL https://c3.nasa.gov/dashlink/resources/193/
    Program Code 026:029
    Source Datajson Identifier True
    Source Hash 4000bc6727f9dc301a11449a9d6039a77de9be15d8ab1fbe04a7e9e74051ede0
    Source Schema Version 1.1

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