ALBERT

Description: The Copernicus Hyperspectral Imaging Mission for the Environment (CHIME) is a new ESA Earth Observation mission which consists in developing a hyperspectral satellite to support EU policies on the management of natural resources, ultimately helping to address the global issue of food security. One of the mission activities is associated to the development of the CHIME-E2E (End-to-End) Performance Simulator that shall be used to evaluate the sensor design and future processing modules provided by the partners by simulating future CHIME images and thematic products. In the frame of this activity, the CHIME Mission Advisory Group (MAG) has identified a collection of five core high priority products (HPP) that includes the retrieval of canopy nitrogen, leaf nitrogen content, leaf mass/area, soil organic carbon content (SOC) and kaolinite abundance. In this paper, we present the first results of applying the L2B prototype processing to hyperspectral airborne and spatial imagery used to simulate realistic CHIME data, to derive soil and mineral maps. The obtained results demonstrate the potential of the next generation of Copernicus missions with high spectral resolution and wide swath imaging satellite for geoscience research and applications.