In this study DAIS 7915 thermal imaging spectrometer (IS) data were analyzed for its potential for evaporite mineral mapping near Mt. Sedom, Israel. As thermal DAIS 7915 data has not been used for such purposes and only scarcely been used at all for mineral mapping purposes so far, the presented study has the character of a demonstration study. The study includes two parts, where in the first part a standard pre-processing approach has been applied to the data including noise reduction, atmospheric correction (MODTRAN) and temperature emissivity separation (emissivity normalization method), to evaluate the general potential of the DAIS data for surface emissivity and temperature extraction. In a second part the resulting information was analyzed for its information content and mineral mapping potential. Results revealed a high systematic noise content in the data, that severely limits all further data evaluation. Despite these restrictions, the produced temperature map of the Mt. Sedom area showed very interesting surface temperature patterns with a relative temperature resolution of less than 0.5 K. Accuracy of the estimated temperatures is believed to be of the order of 1-2 K. A validation experiment for the emissive surface information extracted from the DAIS thermal data also revealed a good correspondence with ground truth data. Finally, it was found, that for the given instrument specifications of the DAIS 7915, the discriminative power in an evaporite environment is much lower in the thermal than in the reflective channels.

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Zock, A.; Segl, K.; Ben-Avraham, Z.; Kaufmann, H. (1998): Analysis of the spatial distribution of evaporite sediments at Mount Sedom, Israel, based on DAIS 7915 imaging spectrometer data - Part II: Emissive wavelength range (8.0µm - 12.6µm). Proc. 1st EARSeL Workshop on Imaging Spectroscopy, Remote Sensing Laboratories, 393-402.