Future geostationary weather satellites will be able to monitor the time evolution of surface emission with improved accuracy. In particular, the Geosynchronous Imaging Fourier Transform Spectrometer (GIFTS) instrument, under development for the NASA New Millennium Program, will serve as a valuable test bed for the evaluation of new hardware and software approaches in the years leading up to NOAA's operational Hyperspectral Environmental Suite (HES). The GIFTS sensor makes use of a 2-D array of detectors to increase area coverage rates while providing improved surface remote sensing by monitoring the temporal change in the thermal infrared upwelling emission spectrum at high spectral resolution. The University of Wisconsin Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (UW-CIMSS) is developing algorithms for the exploitation of current and future hyperspectral sensors on polar orbiting and geostationary satellite platforms. This paper will present lessons learned to date from field observations using existing ground-based (S-AERI), aircraft (S-HIS/NAST-I), and satellite instruments (AIRS). The ground-based observations provide important measurements of pure scene types (bare soil, vegetation) for the determination of surface emissivity and a measurement of the temporal change in surface temperature across the day/night transition. The high altitude aircraft observations provide the high spatial resolution information needed to link the ground-based measurements to the satellite sounder footprints. The satellite data provides nearly instantaneous coverage of a large region and in the case of AIRS provides an estimate of the atmospheric thermodynamic state needed to account for atmospheric attenuation of the surface emission.