Advanced Environmental Monitoring with Remote Sensing Time Series Data and R, Gemitzi, Alexandra

• Includes a wide spectrum of environmental applications and issues
• Explains methodological image analysis and interpretation procedures for conducting a variety of environmental analyses
• Discusses the development of early warning systems
• Covers monitoring of the environment as a whole - atmosphere, land, and water
• Explores the latest remote sensing systems in environmental applications

This book is an excellent resource for anyone who is interested in remote sensing technologies and their use in Earth systems, natural resources, and environmental science.

The book explores a range of applications for monitoring four critical components of the hydrological cycle related to drought: vegetation health, evapotranspiration, soil moisture and groundwater, and precipitation. These applications use remotely sensed optical, thermal, microwave, radar, and gravity data from instruments such as AMSR-E, GOES, GRACE, MERIS, MODIS, and Landsat and implement several advanced modeling and data assimilation techniques. Examples show how to integrate this information into routine drought products. The book also examines the role of satellite remote sensing within traditional drought monitoring, as well as current challenges and future prospects.

Improving drought monitoring is becoming increasingly important in addressing a wide range of societal issues, from food security and water scarcity to human health, ecosystem services, and energy production. This unique book surveys innovative remote sensing approaches to provide you with new perspectives on large-area drought monitoring and early warning.

Illustrated in color, this book examines components in the hydrologic cycle with a range of space and time scales. Organized into five parts, it explores hydrologic remote sensing at the local, urban, watershed, and regional scales, as well as the continental and global scale. Contributors address questions such as

• What are the local, watershed, and regional differences in soil moisture and evapotranspiration when using different measurement methods and models?
• How can we fit the scenarios of global warming potential and the remote sensing products of snow water equivalent into hydrologic modeling to address the changing flood and drought conditions in a watershed?
• How can we fuse the images collected by different satellites to improve the accuracy of predictions at the global scale?

Tackling these and many other topics, the book presents new techniques and methods for spaceborne, airborne, and ground-based measurements and mathematical modeling. It also discusses remote sensing image processing tools and features a wealth of real-world applications and case studies.

This book is a useful reference for students, professionals, scientists, and policy makers involved in the study of global change, hydrologic science, meteorology, climatology, biology, ecology, and the agricultural and forest sciences. It shows how hydrologic remote sensing technologies can be used more effectively to explore global change impacts and improve the design of hydrologic observatories.

Divided into four sections, the first deals with various sensors, systems, or sensing operations using different regions of wavelengths. Drawing on the data and lessons learned from the U.S. Landsat remote sensing programs, it reviews key concepts, methods, and practical uses of particular sensors/sensing systems. Section II presents new developments in algorithms and techniques, specifically in image preprocessing, thematic information extraction, and digital change detection. It gives correction algorithms for hyperspectral, thermal, and multispectral sensors, discusses the combined method for performing topographic and atmospheric corrections, and provides examples of correcting non-standard atmospheric conditions, including haze, cirrus, and cloud shadow.

Section III focuses on remote sensing of vegetation and related features of the Earth's surface. It reviews advancements in the remote sensing of ecosystem structure, process, and function, and notes important trade-offs and compromises in characterizing ecosystems from space related to spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions of the imaging sensors. It discusses the mismatch between leaf-level and species-level ecological variables and satellite spatial resolutions and the resulting difficulties in validating satellite-derived products.

Finally, Section IV examines developments in the remote sensing of air, water, and other terrestrial features, reviews MODIS algorithms for aerosol retrieval at both global and local scales, and demonstrates the retrieval of aerosol optical thickness (AOT). This section rounds out coverage with a look at remote sensing approaches to measure the urban environment and examines the most important concepts and recent research.