ECOSTRESS Data Product Reader

ECOSTRESS Mission Overview

The ECOSTRESS instrument measures the temperature of plants and uses that information to better understand how much water plants need and how they respond to stress.

ECOSTRESS addresses three overarching science questions:

How is the terrestrial biosphere responding to changes in water availability?
How do changes in diurnal vegetation water stress impact the global carbon cycle?
Can agricultural vulnerability be reduced through advanced monitoring of agricultural water consumptive use and improved drought estimation?

The ECOSTRESS mission answers these questions by accurately measuring the temperature of plants. Plants regulate their temperature by releasing water through tiny pores on their leaves called stomata. If they have sufficient water, they can maintain their temperature. However, if there is insufficient water, their temperatures rise. This temperature rise can be measured with a sensor in space. ECOSTRESS uses a multispectral thermal infrared (TIR) radiometer to measure the surface temperature, deployed on the International Space Station. The instrument will measure radiances at 5 spectral bands in the 8-12.5 m range with approximately 38 meter by 57 meter of spatial resolution on the ground.

ECOSTRESS Data Products

The ECOSTRESS mission will generate 13 different distributable data products. The products represent four levels of data processing, with data granules defined as an image scene. Each image scene consists of 44 scans of the instrument mirror, each scan taking approximately 1.181 seconds, and each image scene taking approximately 52 seconds. Each image scene starts at the beginning of the first target area encountered during each orbit. Each orbit is defined as the equatorial crossing of an ascending International Space Station (ISS) orbit.

ECOSTRESS Level 0 data include spacecraft packets that have been pre-processed by the Ground Data System (GDS). Level 1 products include spacecraft engineering data, the time-tagged raw sensor pixels appended with their radiometric calibration coefficients, the blackbody pixels used to generate the calibration coefficients, geolocated and radiometrically calibrated at-sensor radiances of each image pixel, the geolocation tags of each pixel, and the corrected spacecraft attitude data. Level 2 products include the land surface temperature and emissivity for each spectral band retrieved from the at-sensor radiance data, and a cloud mask. Level 2 products also appear in image scene granules. Level 3 products include evapotranspiration data derived from Level 2 products. Level 4 products include evaporative stress index and water use efficiency derived from Level 3 data.

ECOSTRESS Reader

The reader supports ECOSTRESS L1B/L2/L3/L4 data products in HDF5 data format.

Supported ECOSTRESS product types:

L1B ATT - Corrected spacecraft ephemeris and attitude data
L1B GEO - Geolocation tags, sun angles, and look angles, and calibrated, resampled at-sensor radiances
L1B RAD - Radiometrically corrected, band-aligned, squared at-sensor radiance pixels
L1B MAP RAD - L1B_RAD data map projected to fixed 70 meter pixels
L2 CLOUD - Cloud mask
L2 LSTE - Land Surface temperature and emissivity
L3 ET ALEXI USDA - Evapotranspiration generated at USDA with the ALEXI/DisALEXI Algorithm over specific calibration sites
L3 ET PT JPL - Evaporative Stress Index generated with PT-JPL
L3 L4QA - Quality Assessment fields for all ancillary data used in L3 and L4 products
L4 ESI ALEXI USDA - Evaporative Stress Index generated at USDA with the ALEXI/DisALEXI over specific calibration sites
L4 ESI PT JPL - Evaporative Stress Index generated with PT-JPL
L4 WUE - Water Use efficiency