Climate and Glacier Research Using UV-VIS-NIR Spectroradiometers
With rising greenhouse gas emissions progressively affecting the Earth’s climate it has become vital to develop methods to monitor and predict climate change. Spectral Evolution is proud to say that their instruments are being used in critical research combatting climate change. The use of UV-VIS-NIR is widespread within this field used in things like glacial retreat research, pollutants monitoring, and land-use management. Remote sensing is one of the most important tools to climate scientists to understand climate change on large and small scales. Often our instruments will be deployed alongside satellites to characterize and assess changes in the environment over time.
One example of the utility of our instruments in climate research is in albedo measurements to study glacial recession. Glacial recession is projected to broadly impact ecological and human systems, for by destabilizing mountain slopes, reshaping freshwater communities in glacier-fed watersheds, and reducing summer runoff available for agriculture and hydropower (Hock et al., 2019, Engstrom et al. 2022). The melting of glaciers also contributes to rising sea levels affecting coastal communities all over the world.
Our RS-3500 is currently being used in a study targeting incident radiation change and its effect on glacial retreat. Red snow algal blooms are changing the albedo of the surface of the ice making it darker and inherently absorbing more energy. The spread of this algae could speed up the rate of melting of the ice sheets. Using our instrument along with remote sensing satellites Sentinel-2, Landsat-8, and MODIS/terra researchers can predict algae spread and incident radiation. The satellite data was field calibrated using the RS-3500 to accurately predict algae abundance from the satellites scale.
There are countless environmental applications like this that utilize the high sensitivity, and high spectral and spatial resolution of our field instruments to calibrate their coarser satellite data. This can be used to quantify algae abundance, species population analysis, soil analysis and characterization, carbon sequestration, land management, as well as many other environmental metrics.
(A) Spectral reflectance profile and sample ID text labels are colored proportional to red snow algal cell area percent cover (ACA%), defined as the percent ratio of the total cross-sectional area of all red snow algal cells in a sample to the snow sample surface area. (B –D) Representative photographs of white and red snow samples. Sample ID indicated in top left of each photograph. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
Our remote sensing series spectroradiometers are a quintessential tool for climate scientists. They are incredibly useful for this application due to their rugged and lightweight design. Our instruments are made to be field instruments with the highest spectral resolution and sensitivity on the market. This allows researchers to bring lab quality data into the field and validate even the most robust remote sensing drones and satellites. All of our remote sensing instrument are well-suited to support calibrating algorithms to satellites.
For pre-flight calibration, the RS-3500 delivers the following features:
- Spectral resolution 350—2500nm
- UV/VIS/NIR full range, fast, one-touch scanning
- Compact, lightweight and reliable with no moving parts
- Autoexposure, autoscaling, and auto dark current shutter
- Easy to set up anywhere
- Long-term stability
- DARWin™ SP Data Acquisition software captures spectra in ASCII format for use with third party software—no pre-processing required