A90
Beechcraft King Air A90

The Airborne Snow Observatory (ASO) is a suite of instruments that fly aboard an aircraft. In this suite is a Riegl Q1560 scanning lidar and a CASI 1500 imaging spectrometer. ASO measures snow water equivalent, albedo, and reflected radiance.

The Compact Airborne Spectrographic Imager (CASI) is a relatively small, lightweight hyper-spectral sensor that has been used on a variety of light aircraft. CASI was developed by Itres Research Ltd (Alberta, Canada) in 1988 and was designed for a variety of remote sensing applications in forestry, agriculture, land-use planning, and aquatic monitoring. By allowing user-defined configurations, the 12-bit, push-broom-type sensor (333 scan lines per second) using a charge-coupled detector (CCD) can be adapted to maximize either spatial (37.8° across track field of view, 0.077° along-track, 512 pixels – pixel size varies with altitude) or spectral resolution (288 bands at 1.9 nm intervals between 400 and 1000 nm).