National EO Validation Campaigns – a proven capability to build on. The L8/L9 Underfly Example

The recent federal funding of the National Space Mission for Observation is in no small part a recognition of the capability of the Australian EO community and central to this is the ability to mount effective national-scale field validation programs.

After many delays, Landsat 9 was launched on the 27th September 2021. Before being handed to the USGS for operational use, NASA had oversight of configuring and testing the new platform and navigating it into its final operational orbit. For a brief few days and a handful of overpasses globally, Landsat 9 was scheduled to fly ‘under’ its predecessor Landsat 8.  This provided the global EO community a ‘once in a mission lifetime’ opportunity to collect field validation data from both sensors.

At short notice the USGS were advised on the timing and location of these orbital overpasses.  For Australia, this meant that between the 11th and 17th of November we would see a single overpass with 100% sensor overlap and three others that featured only 10% overlap. Geoscience Australia (who have a longstanding partnership with the USGS on satellite Earth observation) put out a call to the Australian EO community for collaborators.

Despite this compressed timeline, COVID travel restrictions and widespread La Niña induced rain and flooding, teams from CSIRO, Queensland DES, Environment NSW, University of WA, Frontier SI and GA were able to capture high value ground and water validation data in each of the overpasses.

Going forward, the Australian EO community need to maintain and build on these skills and capabilities such that the community can meet the future demands of not only our existing international EO collaborations but the imminent arrival of Australian orbiting EO sensors.

Abstract presented at Advancing Earth Observation Forum 2022 (https://www.eoa.org.au/event-calendar/2021/12/1/advancing-earth-observation-aeo-2021-22-forum)