North America Phenology Campaign

PACE Resources

NASA's PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) satellite launched in 2024 and provides a unique hyperspectral view of the entire planet every 1–2 days. PACE gives us a novel look at timing and progression of fall colors across the landscape. 

NASA scientists working on the PACE satellite mission are asking for your help to collect forest landscape observations during the fall season using the GLOBE Observer Land Cover tool. 

PACE VisualizationS and Videos

See a visualization of a global view of the plant pigments observed by the PACE satellite.

See PACE's orbit with swaths and instrument fields of view. 

Watch Leaf Year: Seeing Plants in Hyperspectral Color, a video describing how scientists use PACE data to learn about the health of land vegetation by detecting slight variations in leaf colors.

related Learning activities

GLOBE Learning Activity: Investigating Leaf Pigments

  • Explore what pigments exist in leaves. Appropriate for middle/secondary-aged youth and adults.

GLOBE Learning Activity: Global Patterns in Green-Up and Green-Down

  • Analyze visualizations and graphs that show the annual cycle of plant growth and decline. Appropriate for middle/secondary-aged youth and adults.

Elementary GLOBE All Year Long

  • Make observations during or across seasons, focusing on both a "big picture" view and a "zoomed-in" view. Appropriate for elementary-aged youth. 

Q&A With PACE scientists

PACE terrestrial scientists Skye Caplan and Fred Huemmrich answered questions from GLOBE members. See their responses here! 

That's pretty much what the pigment indices, e.g., the chlorophyll index (green) or anthocyanin index (reds) do! Each pigment index tells us relatively how much of a colour is in that pixel, and they do show up in the pigment ratios as well.

We're planning to send some PACE data back to folks who participate, yes! We also have the pigment index data available through NASA Earthdata and here's a link to get you started.

​​​​​​​View weekly updates on the PACE Fall Foliage Updates page.

PACE data are actually distributed at a range of resolutions, with the finest one being ~1.2 km at nadir. We also produce standard 2 km, 4 km, and those 11 km grids. The resolution is relatively coarse compared to other terrestrial missions, but because of that we're able to get near-daily coverage and we can track these things from day to day!

Yes, we have found that the spectral reflectance is strongly related to plant productivity. The caveat of course is they need to be mindful of mixed pixels and the size of their fields. It's best if they have a couple pixels-worth of land, but I know that's rarely the case for individual fields. We have seen some interesting results with the fall colours work over broad agricultural regions, e.g. the corn belt.

photo-tips

At the GLOBE Observer Connect webinar on September 22, U.S. GLOBE Country Coordinator Jennifer Bourgeault asked PACE scientist Skye Caplan to critique photos she had taken for the campaign on a recent hiking trip. Watch the video below to see Skye's comments. 

The major take-aways were:

  • Try to not include a lot of sky in your photos.
  • Include the cardinal direction in the caption of feature photos (not mentioned in this clip, but in another part of the webinar!)
Below are Jennifer's photos.
This photo was deemed "okay" for Skye's purpose. She said that the view is good and like she would see from a satellite, but there is too much sky visible in this image.
Skye preferred this photo because there is less sky visible. She also said it is acceptable to have other land features in the image, like the rock at the bottom of this photo.