The airborne hyperspectral image was acquired by the AVIRIS-Next Generation (AVIRIS-NG) instrument during the AVIRIS-NG Europe 2021 HyperSense campaign that has been conducted as a joint effort of ESA, NASA/JPL and the University of Zurich. Acquired was an agricultural area near Irlbach, Germany on May 30th, 2021. The data was preprocessed (radiometrically, geometrically and atmospherically corrected) to contain 419 bands in the 402 - 2495 nm spectral range.

Metadata was acquired on the same day for the variables Leaf Area Index (LAI), Leaf Chlorophyll content, crop height and phenology.

An overview of metadata acquisition and processing can be found in the HYPERedu YouTube videos on ground reference data acquisition in the field and ground reference data acquisition in the lab. More details on LAI and chlorophyll acquisition can be found in the field data guides assembled by the authors of this dataset via enmap.org (Danner et al., 2015; Süß et al., 2015).

The dataset is made publically available within the massive open online course (MOOC) "Beyond the Visible - Introduction to Imaging Spectroscopy for Agricultural Applications", available from December 2022.

HYPERedu is an education initiative within the Environmental Mapping and Analysis Program (EnMAP), a German hyperspectral satellite mission that aims at monitoring and characterizing the Earth’s environment on a global scale. EnMAP serves to measure and model key dynamic processes of the Earth’s ecosystems by extracting geochemical, biochemical and biophysical variables, which provide information on the status and evolution of various terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. In the frame of the EnMAP preparatory phase as well as during the operational phase, flight campaigns including airborne and in-situ measurements in different environments and for several application fields are being conducted. The main purpose of these campaigns is to support the development of scientific applications for EnMAP (preparatory) and to improve algorithms and validate spaceborne data during operation. Many campaign data are made freely available to the scientific community under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. An overview of all available data is provided in in the EnMAP Flight Campaigns Metadata Portal (https://www.enmap.org/data_tools/flights/).