SIRENE Station

The SIRENE station (Interdisciplinary site for research in the outdoor environment) is a laboratory and a secure experimental site (75 x 75 m) on the Sherbrooke campus of the Université de Sherbrooke.
for research in remote sensing, environment, engineering, climatology, agronomy, hydrology and metrology.

Manager : Patrick Cliche

Objectives :

  • Encourage projects in all disciplines related to the environment.
  • Provide all the tools and equipment necessary for students and professors to carry out projects in an environment where all physical and optical parameters can be measured and controlled.
  • Develop means and methods to measure, by remote sensing, the parameters of the physical and optical characteristics of the environment (snow, soil, vegetation and atmosphere).
  • Have a safe and protected place to carry out punctual or continuous measurements over time.

Applications :

  • Provide input data for modelling and simulation codes for soil-vegetation-atmosphere interaction processes and thus allow their validation.
  • Validate the products resulting from or derived from airborne or satellite acquisitions (inversion model).
  • Extract biophysical variables from natural environments or structural construction variables by non-destructive sampling (photography, 3D laser imaging, spectrometry).
  • Verify on the ground different physicochemical properties of the environment, which can be measured by remote sensing, using more conventional standard analytical methods in the laboratory.
  • Monitor several natural or anthropogenic dynamic phenomena in various environments (types of soil erosion, agricultural soil degradation, water pollution, biomass evolution)
  • Develop spectroradiometric measurement methodologies for natural or cultivated targets.
  • Calibrate sensors with standard laboratory analysis methods.
  • Analyze, understand and model phenomena involved in the physics of measurement.
  • Characterize and model microwave, thermal and optical properties of terrestrial targets and the atmosphere.
  • Measure forest stand parameters using hemispheric photography.

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This station was built with grants from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), the Ministère de l’Éducation du Québec and the Université de Sherbrooke.