Since 1970, increased plastic use and waste mismanagement have contributed to environmental pollution leading to the proliferation of microplastics and ocean contamination. Understanding the plastic presence on-land is crucial as most plastic pollution originates from land-based sources. From its vantage point-of-view on the International Space Station, NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) imaging spectrometer can measure surface reflectance spectra across a wavelength range of 380 nm to 2500 nm. We present a study using this instrument to detect distinctive absorption features of High-density polyethylene (HDPE) and Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) plastics in the shortwave infrared. By applying a column-wise adaptive matched filter and using a library of plastic reflectance spectra, we successfully identified signatures of these two types of plastics across multiple continents between +/- 52 degrees, primarily related to agricultural practices. Our study underscores the importance of monitoring land-based sources of plastic pollution to guide future mitigation strategies.

Chemical and biological composition of surface materials and physical structure and arrangement of those materials determine the intrinsic reflectance of Earth’s land surface. The apparent reflectance—as measured by a spaceborne or airborne sensor that has been corrected for atmospheric attenuation—depends also on topography, surface roughness, and the atmosphere. Especially in Earth’s mountains, estimating properties of scientific interest from remotely sensed data requires compensation for topography. Doing so requires information from digital elevation models (DEMs). Available DEMs with global coverage are derived from spaceborne interferometric radar and stereo-photogrammetry at ~30 m spatial resolution. Locally or regionally, lidar altimetry, interferometric radar, or stereo-photogrammetry produces DEMs with finer resolutions. Characterization of their quality typically expresses the root-mean-square (RMS) error of the elevation, but the accuracy of remotely sensed retrievals is sensitive to uncertainties in topographic properties that affect incoming and reflected radiation and that are inadequately represented by the RMS error of the elevation. The most essential variables are the cosine of the local solar illumination angle on a slope, the shadows cast by neighboring terrain, and the view factor, the fraction of the overlying hemisphere open to the sky. Comparison of global DEMs with locally available fine-scale DEMs shows that calculations with the global products consistently underestimate the cosine of the solar angle and underrepresent shadows. Analyzing imagery of Earth’s mountains from current and future spaceborne missions requires addressing the uncertainty introduced by errors in DEMs on algorithms that analyze remotely sensed data to produce information about Earth’s surface.

Mixed pixels are the rule, not the exception, in decameter terrestrial imaging. By definition, the reflectance spectrum of a mixed pixel is a function of more than one generative process. Physically-based surface biology or geology retrievals must therefore isolate the component of interest from a myriad of unrelated processes, heterogenously distributed across hundreds of square meters. Foliar traits, for example, must be isolated from canopy structure and substrate composition which can dominate overall variance of spatially integrated reflectance. We propose a new approach to isolate low-variance spectral signatures. The reflectance of each pixel is modeled assuming linear geographic mixing due to a small library of generic endmembers. The difference between the modeled and observed spectra is deemed the Mixture Residual (MR). The MR, a residual reflectance spectrum that is presumed to carry the subtler and variable signals of interest, is then leveraged as a source of signal. We illustrate the approach using three datasets: synthetic composites computed from field reflectance spectra, NEON AOP airborne image compilations, and DESIS satellite data. The MR discriminates between land cover versus plant trait signals and accentuates subtle absorption features. Mean band-to-band correlations within the visible, NIR, and SWIR wavebands decrease from 0.97, 0.94, and 0.97 to 0.95, 0.04 and 0.31. The number of dimensions required to explain 99% of image variance increases from 4 to 13. We focus on vegetation as an illustrative example, but note that the concept can be extended to other applications and used as an input to other algorithms.

We introduce and evaluate an approach for the simultaneous retrieval of aerosol and surface properties from Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer Classic (AVIRIS-C) data collected during wildfires. The joint National Aeronautics and Space Administration/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NASA/NOAA) Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality (FIREX-AQ) field campaign took place in August 2019, and involved two aircraft and coordinated ground-based observations. The AVIRIS-C instrument acquired data from onboard NASA’s high altitude ER-2 research aircraft, coincident in space and time with aerosol observations obtained from the Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) DRAGON mobile platform in the smoke plume downwind of the Williams Flats Fire in northern Washington in August, 2019. Observations in this smoke plume were used to assess the capacity of optimal-estimation based retrievals to simultaneously estimate aerosol optical depth (AOD) and surface reflectance from Visible Shortwave Infrared (VSWIR) imaging spectroscopy. Radiative transfer modeling of the sensitivities in spectral information collected over smoke reveal the potential capacity of high spectral resolution retrievals to distinguish between sulfate and smoke aerosol models, as well as sensitivity to the aerosol size distribution. Comparison with ground-based AERONET observations demonstrates that AVIRIS-C retrievals of AOD compare favorably with direct sun AOD measurements. Our analyses suggest that spectral information collected from the full VSWIR spectral interval, not just the shortest wavelengths, enables accurate retrievals. We use this approach to continuously map both aerosols and surface reflectance at high spatial resolution across heterogeneous terrain, even under relatively high AOD conditions associated with wildfire smoke.