In support of a continuing program of evaluation and experimental validation of FLIR Tactical Decision Aid performance codes, a series of measurements has been made of ship radiance temperature distributions together with sea and sky backgrounds. The measurements have been made at ranges from one quarter to one mile off the coastline in Monterey Bay, using a land- mounted Agema 780 dual band Thermovision radiometric sensor, with computer data acquisition and storage. The target ship was the research vessel Point Sur carrying a full suite of meteorological instruments and an array of thermal sensors for ship surface temperature distribution. Rawinsonde balloons were released to obtain vertical temperature and humidity profiles for path correction using LOWTRAN. The normal skin emissivity was measured in a separate experiment. The current data band consists of 898 stored radiometric frames containing ship images including starboard, port, bow and stern aspects, together with sea and sky background frames with varied zenith angle. These files are available for false color display and analysis in a variety of formats.

Date Published: 1 July 1991
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 1486, Characterization, Propagation, and Simulation of Sources and Backgrounds, (1 July 1991); doi: 10.1117/12.45750

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 1486:
Characterization, Propagation, and Simulation of Sources and Backgrounds
Wendell R. Watkins; Dieter Clement, Editor(s)