NET-Sense is the joint NASA ESA Temperature Sensing Experiment. The overall objectives of NET-Sense are related to the proposed future European High Spatio-Temporal Resolution Land Surface Temperature Monitoring (LSTM) satellite mission, which is a candidate future Sentinel satellite. Evapotranspiration is the process by which water is transferred from the land to the atmosphere by evaporation from the soil and other surfaces, and by transpiration from plants. The weather, crop characteristics, agricultural and land management and environmental aspects are all factors that affect levels of evaporation and transpiration, and the ability to map levels of evapotranspiration across agricultural landscapes provides information that is extremely useful in understanding better how much water different plants require in different regions, and how they respond to stresses such as unusually dry periods. The LSTM mission aims to address these types of water, agriculture and food security issues by monitoring the variability of land surface temperature (LST) at the European field scale, from which estimates of evapotranspiration can be mapped. This in turn will provide more robust estimates of field-scale water productivity and support the Copernicus land monitoring service, related European and also Global and international policies as well as downstream applications related to other science areas such as natural hazards and urban climate.
The primary aim of NET-Sense is to help initial work on the LSTM design by collecting unique data over mainly agricultural and urban landscapes in the UK and in continental Europe with highly sophisticated airborne remote sensing systems. These data will be used to aid the LSTM mission design and the specification of the algorithms that will be used to deliver estimates of LST and evapotranspiration from the ‘raw’ LSTM data. For this reason NET-Sense involves flying one of the most sophisticated airborne thermal imaging sensors currently available – the HyTES system designed and built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) alongside the Specim Fenix instrument operated by NERC’s Airborne Research Facility (NERC-ARF) and National Center for Earth Observation (NCEO) and King’s College London (King’s) and processed by the NERC Earth Observation Data Acquisition and Analysis Service (NEODAAS). Data from the HyTES instrument are being archived separately by JPL.
For more information on the project see https://www.nceo.ac.uk/article/measuring-uk-temperature-and-evaporation/