A cutting-edge eye in the sky: This Hawaii aircraft is mapping the world’s land and oceans

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - Many of the world’s scientists and ecologists rely on an aerial assistant to help them learn more about environmental impacts and climate change.

The Global Airborne Observatory is a high-tech aircraft that was built on Hawaii Island and is based in Hilo.

“It’s a system that allows us to fly over both land and ocean ecosystems and measure the biodiversity, to measure the three-dimensional structure of the place, to really get detailed intel about the state of an ecosystem, anything we fly over,” airborne ecologist Greg Asner said.

Asner is the director of Arizona State University’s Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science. He designed the flying laboratory on board a Dornier 228-202 aircraft.

“The aircraft is in its fourth generation now,” Asner said. “The first one I built was in 2004 in Hilo, so we say that the aircraft program was born and raised in Hilo.”

Mounted inside the cabin is state-of-the-art equipment that enable scientists to measure and map the earth using lasers that zero in on coral reefs or trees in a tropical forest. An imaging spectrometer focuses on the chemical properties in an ecosystem, while another tool measures water quality.

“We’re really collecting a lot of information at super-high resolution and from that generating all this knowledge,” Asner said.

The scans are turned into detailed maps. The information is shared with managers and policy makers who study climate change and environmental impacts.

“We’re looking at all of that now to try to figure out where are the places that science can inform management to have interventions that are going to work,” Asner said.

The technology has been used to study Hawaii’s reef system and the state of coral around the world. The aircraft gave scientists their first look at the rate of rapid Ohia death.

“That’s a great use of our technology in trying to figure out a hard problem, which is this pathogen that’s passing through our forests,” Asner said.

The Global Airborne Observatory flies at a speed of 20 acres per second. It has scanned and mapped hundreds of millions of acres of ocean and land around the world.

“The technology is all about getting the bird’s eye view but maintaining all of the detail as if you’re walking through the forest or scuba diving on the reef,” Asner said.

He is also hoping what he has done will inspire students from Hawaii to get involved in his field of work.

“People like me make it sound like we have it all figured out, but we need more people,” he said.

During his 34-year career, Asner has published more than 800 papers in scientific journals, including articles about his cutting-edge eye in the sky.

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