Autor:innen:
Prof. Sabine Chabrillat | GFZ Potsdam und Leibniz Universität Hannover | Germany
Dr. Robert Milewski | GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences | Germany
Kathrin Ward | GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences | Germany
Dr. Saskia Foerster | GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences | Germany
Christopher Loy | GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences | Germany
Diana Boy | Leibniz Universität Hannover | Germany
Dr. Jens Boy | Leibniz Universität Hannover | Germany
Prof. Georg Guggenberger | Leibniz Universität Hannover | Germany
There is nowadays a renewed awareness of the finite nature of the world’s soil resources. Regular assessments of soil conditions from local through to global scales are requested, and there is a clear demand for accurate, up-to-date and spatially referenced soil information by the modelling scientific community, farmers and land users, and policy- and decision-makers. Soil and imaging spectroscopy (hyperspectral imagery), based on visible-near-infrared and shortwave infrared spectral reflectance from 400–2500 nm, has been shown to be a proven method for the quantitative prediction of key soil properties. Soil spectroscopy at remote sensing scale would be able to provide quantitative spatial representation of surface soil data at local and regional scale. Currently, with the launch of new spaceborne hyperspectral missions relevant for soil mapping and with open data policy such as PRISMA (ASI, launch 2019) and EnMAP (DLR, launch 2022), a high potential for global soil mapping and monitoring is appearing. Nevertheless, some methodological and technical challenges and gaps are observed and the real potential of spaceborne hyperspectral is still to be fully demonstrated.
The Environmental Mapping and Analysis Program (EnMAP) is a new spaceborne German hyperspectral satellite mission, whose primary goal is to generate accurate information on bio- and geo-physical properties of the Earth´s ecosystems for the monitoring of environmental changes, ecosystem responses to human activities, and management of natural resources such as soils and minerals. The EnMAP was launched in April 2022 from Cap Canaveral and since November 2022, EnMAP data archives are available on the web and new Earth observation acquisitions can be acquired upon request through the EnMAP portal.
We aim to present the status of the EnMAP mission and demonstrate in a few case studies in different environments (e.g. Germany, Spain, Greece, Atacama) capabilities and potential of spaceborne hyperspectral imaging for the spatial mapping of surface soil properties. Preliminary analyses over early EnMAP imagery from summer 2022 over the Camarena (Central Spain) and Aminteio (Northern Greece) cropland areas show that we are able to determine percent organic matter, clay and carbonate content with reasonable accuracy based on pixel-wise detection of bare dry soil pixels and application of Partial Least Square analyses over the soil pixels.