Synergies of Spaceborne Imaging Spectroscopy with Other Remote Sensing Approaches

Imaging spectroscopy (IS), also commonly known as hyperspectral remote sensing, is a powerful remote sensing technique for the monitoring of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere. Pixels in optical hyperspectral images consist of continuous reflectance spectra formed by hundreds of narrow spectral channels, allowing an accurate representation of the surface composition through spectroscopic techniques. However, technical constraints in the definition of imaging spectrometers make spectral coverage and resolution to be usually traded by spatial resolution and swath width, as opposed to optical multispectral (MS) systems typically designed to maximize spatial and/or temporal resolution. This complementarity suggests that a synergistic exploitation of spaceborne IS and MS data would be an optimal way to fulfill those remote sensing applications requiring not only high spatial and temporal resolution data, but also rich spectral information. On the other hand, IS has been shown to yield a strong synergistic potential with non-optical remote sensing methods, such as thermal infrared (TIR) and light detection and ranging (LiDAR). In this contribution we review theoretical and methodological aspects of potential synergies between optical IS and other remote sensing techniques. The focus is put on the evaluation of synergies between spaceborne optical IS and MS systems because of the expected availability of the two types of data in the next years. Short reviews of potential synergies of IS with TIR and LiDAR measurements are also provided.