The Tornado aircraft of the 51th reconnaissance squadron 'Immelmann' are equipped with high-resolution infrared cameras. Due to its high air speed the infra-red camera aboard the Tornado aircraft covered the experimental site of about 20 km times 20 km in less than 30 minutes. The surface temperature distribution changed slowly, so these photographies represent snapshots of the surface temperature of the entire area. Since the Tornado cameras use analog technique (chemical films) the spatial resolution is in the order of a meter or (depending on aircraft's altitude) even better. The first impressive result of the analysis of these photographies is that the heterogeneity of the experimental site was much stronger than assumed by the numerical models used so far. Especially the influence of the water content of different soil types is clearly visible.
The infrared pictures sampled by the Tornado aircraft provide relative temperature distributions and are not calibrated. For the usual reconnaissance task the camera systems are optimized for a maximum contrast and not for absolute temperature measurements. But via the comparison with simultaneous measurements of other involved systems these gray-scale photographies can be temperature-calibrated. Especially the horizontal flights at low altitude with the Helipod provide an excellent calibration tool. The measurements at several ground stations give the opportunity for data quality control and cross-validation. During the LITFASS 2003 campaign the Landsat satellite made several flights over the experimental site. The next step will be the comparison of Landsat data with temperature maps obtained from Tornado flights.
Supplementary URL: