Tel Aviv University: HRS is an environmental early warning system

Tel Aviv University (TAU) has announced that its Remote Hyperspectral Sensor provides the bigger picture of environmental pollution and erosion soon enough to allow the averting of worse damage and new disasters.

TAU's Remote Hyperspectral Sensor (RHS) blends the latest physical, chemical, and optical technologies to detect and assess hundreds of changes in soil, water, and air simultaneously through spectrophotometry. Data from sensors placed on land and flown in aircraft augment the detailed data collected by satellites in orbit. According to Professor Eyal Ben-Dor of TAU's Department of Geography, the novel, colorful maps produced by their RHS will give scientists and planners thematic, real-time images of earth's problem areas that are far more predictive than traditional hyperspectral data-cubes and other spectral analysis methods. A University of Texas at Austin Center for Space Research introduction to hyperspectral remote sensing explains that hyperspectral pictures generated by orbiting satellites include information from a much wider portion of the electromagnetic spectrum than the relatively narrow range of light wave frequencies visible though the human sense of sight. All chemicals display unique, recognizable electromagnetic patterns — called spectral signatures — that computerized processing systems show as vivid, tell-tale colors and other graphic representations of data. Scientists in mineralogy, agriculture, meteorology, ecology and climatology already use hyperspectrally enhanced human vision for planning and problem solving. Professor Ben-Dor has presented many applications of his team's new RHS technology in Soil Science Society of America Journals, Soil Science Journal and the International Journal of Remote Sensing and several other leading journals. Professor Ben-Dor claims that TAU's RHS will allow impending disasters such as floods and washouts to be seen — technologically — from space much sooner, allowing earlier, more effective preventive actions.