Remote Sensing, Volume 6, Issue 11

Benefiting from the high spatiotemporal resolution and near-global coverage, satellite-based precipitation products are applied in many research fields. However, the applications of these products may be limited due to lack of information on the unce...

Launched in February 2013, the Landsat-8 carries on-board the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS), a two-band thermal pushbroom imager, to maintain the thermal imaging capability of the Landsat program. The TIRS bands are centered at roughly 10.9 and 12 μ...

Airborne laser scanner (ALS) data provide an enhanced capability to remotely map two key variables in forestry: leaf area index (LAI) and tree height (H). Nevertheless, the cost, complexity and accessibility of this technology are not yet suited for...

Satellite remote sensing is a promising technology for monitoring natural and anthropogenic changes occurring in remote, northern environments. It offers the potential to scale-up ground-based, local environmental monitoring efforts to document distu...

Mapping landscape dynamics is necessary to assess cumulative impacts due to climate change and development in Arctic regions. Landscape changes produce a range of temporal reflectance trajectories that can be obtained from remote sensing image time-s...

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Coral Reef Watch (CRW) program has developed a daily global 5-km product suite based on satellite observations to monitor thermal stress on coral reefs. These products fulfill requests f...

This study presents preliminary results of the validation of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) daily LST products (MOD/MYD11A1, Version 5) using longwave radiation ground measurements obtained at 12 stations in the North Arid...

Temporal-related features are important for improving land cover classification accuracy using remote sensing data. This study investigated the efficacy of phenological features extracted from time series MODIS Normalized Difference Vegetation Index...

Extraction and interpretation of tectonic lineaments is one of the routines for mapping large areas using remote sensing data. However, this is a subjective and time-consuming process. It is difficult to choose an optimal lineament extraction method...

Effective conservation of woodland vernal pools—important components of regional amphibian diversity and ecosystem services—depends on locating and mapping these pools accurately. Current methods for identifying potential vernal pools are primarily b...

A study was carried out to parameterize the METRIC (Mapping EvapoTranspiration at high Resolution with Internalized Calibration) model for estimating instantaneous values of albedo (shortwave albedo) (α_i), net radiation (R_ni) and soil heat flux (G_i),...

There are growing demands for detailed and accurate land cover maps in land system research and planning. Macro-scale land cover maps normally cannot satisfy the studies that require detailed land cover maps at micro scales. In the meantime, applying...

Ecosystem state can be characterized by a set of attributes that are related to the ecosystem functionality, which is a relevant issue in understanding the quality and quantity of ecosystem services and goods, adaptive capacity and resilience to pert...

This work explores the spatial distribution of monsoonal flooded areas using ENVISAT C-band Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) in the semi-arid region of N. Gujarat, India. The amplitude component of SAR Single Look Complex (SLC) images has bee...

Compared to natural waters, mine waters represent an extreme water type that is frequently heavily polluted. Although they have been traditionally monitored by in situ measurements of point samples taken at regular intervals, the emergence of a new g...

This paper presents a hybrid ensemble method that is comprised of a sequential and a parallel architecture for the classification of tree genus using LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) data. The two classifiers use different sets of features: (1) fe...

The Landsat program has been producing an archive of thermal imagery that spans the globe and covers 30 years of the thermal history of the planet at human scales (60–120 m). Most of that archive’s absolute radiometric calibration has been fixed thr...

High-voltage power lines can be quite easily mapped using laser scanning data, because vegetation close to high-voltage lines is typically removed and also because the power lines are located higher off the ground in contrast to regional networks and...

Variability in snow melt onset (MO) on Arctic sea ice since 1979 is examined by determining the area of sea ice experiencing the onset of melting during the melt season on a daily basis. The daily MO area of the snow and ice surface is determined fro...

Given that ground stationary infrastructures for traffic monitoring are barely able to handle everyday traffic volumes, there is a risk that they could fail altogether in situations arising from mass events or disasters. In this work, we present an a...

Net all-wave surface radiation (R_n) is one of the most important fundamental parameters in various applications. However, conventional R_n measurements are difficult to collect because of the high cost and ongoing maintenance of recording instruments....

The miniaturization of electronics, computers and sensors has created new opportunities for remote sensing applications. Despite the current restrictions on regulation, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with small thermal, laser or spectra...

Hyperspectral images are of increasing importance in remote sensing applications. Imaging spectrometers provide semi-continuous spectra that can be used for physics based surface cover material identification and quantification. Preceding radiometric...

This paper presents a multidisciplinary methodology to evaluate an underground wine cellar structure using non-invasive techniques. In particular, a historical subterranean wine cellar that presents a complex structure and whose physical properties a...

The Landsat 8 spacecraft was launched on 11 February 2013 carrying the Operational Land Imager (OLI) payload for moderate resolution imaging in the visible, near infrared (NIR), and short-wave infrared (SWIR) spectral bands. During the 90-day commiss...

The Landsat 8 spacecraft was launched on 11 February 2013 carrying two imaging payloads: the Operational Land Imager (OLI) and the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS). The TIRS instrument employs a refractive telescope design that is opaque to visible wav...

This paper describes the setting and results of a real-time experiment of irrigation scheduling by a time series of optical satellite images under real conditions, which was carried out on durum wheat in the Haouz plain (Marrakech, Morocco), during t...

Monitoring the start of the crop season in Sahel provides decision makers with valuable information for an early assessment of potential production and food security threats. Presently, the most common method for the estimation of sowing dates in Wes...

This paper presents a microwave/optical synergistic methodology to retrieve soil moisture in an alpine prairie. The methodology adequately represents the scattering behavior of the vegetation-covered area by defining the scattering of the vegetation...

In this paper, the authors present a recent integrated survey carried out on an archaeological urban site, generally free of buildings, except some temporary structures related to excavated areas where multi-chamber tombs were found. The two methods...

During the last years commercial hyperspectral imaging sensors have been miniaturized and their performance has been demonstrated on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). However currently the commercial hyperspectral systems still require minimum payload...

Flash Flood Guidance consists of indices that estimate the amount of rain of a certain duration that is needed over a given small basin in order to cause minor flooding. Backwater catchment inundation from swollen rivers or regional groundwater input...

Vegetation cover can affect the lithological mapping capability of space- and airborne instruments because it obscures the spectral signatures of the underlying geological substrate. Despite being widely accepted as a hindrance, few studies have expl...

Global insurance markets are vast and diverse, and may offer many opportunities for remote sensing. To date, however, few operational applications of remote sensing for insurance exist. Papers claiming potential application of remote sensing typicall...

For a foam-covered sea surface, it is difficult to retrieve sea surface salinity (SSS) with L-band brightness temperature (1.4 GHz) because of the effect of a foam layer with wind speeds stronger than 7 m/s, especially at low sea surface temperature...

The origin of large areas dominated by pristine open vegetation that is in sharp contrast with surrounding dense forest within the Amazonian lowland has generally been related to past arid climates, but this is still an issue open for debate. In this...

Human land use legacies have significant and long-lasting ecological impacts across landscapes. Investigating ancient (>400 years) legacy effects can be problematic due to the difficulty in detecting specific, historic land uses, especially those...

Building change detection is useful for land management, disaster assessment, illegal building identification, urban growth monitoring, and geographic information database updating. This study proposes an automatic method that applies object-based an...

In this study, we test and demonstrate the utility of disturbance and recovery information derived from annual Landsat time series to predict current forest vertical structure (as compared to the more common approaches, that consider a sample of airb...

Rice is the most important food security crop in Asia. Information on its seasonal extent forms part of the national accounting of many Asian countries. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery is highly suitable for detecting lowland rice, especially...

The monitoring of soil salinity levels is necessary for the prevention and mitigation of land degradation in arid environments. To assess the potential of remote sensing in estimating and mapping soil salinity in the El-Tina Plain, Sinai, Egypt, two...

For near real-time water applications, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometers (MODIS) on Terra and Aqua are currently the only satellite instruments that can provide well-calibrated top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiance data over the global aq...

In this paper we explore the performances and the opportunities provided by the European satellite Sentinel-1 for water resource management applications in low-income countries. The analysis is supported by a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) simulator,...

Land use and land cover (LULC) datasets for Beijing in 1978, 1987, 1992, 2000 and 2010 were developed from Landsat images using the object-oriented classification approach. The relationships between social-economic, demographic and political factors...

This study assesses the analysis performance of a hybrid DEnKF-variational data assimilation (DA) method (DEnVar) for assimilating the MODIS snow cover fraction (SCF) into the Common Land Model (CoLM). Coupling a deterministic ensemble Kalman filter...

While CO₂ emissions of cities are widely discussed, carbon storage in urban vegetation has been rarely empirically analyzed. Remotely sensed data offer considerable benefits for addressing this lack of information. The aim of this paper is to develop...

In contrast to ground-based solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (Fs) detection, the influence of atmospheric radiation transfer is the major difficulty in Fs retrieval from space. In this study, we first simulated top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiance...

Pushbroom-style imaging systems exhibit several advantages over line scanners when used on space-borne platforms as they typically achieve higher signal-to-noise and reduce the need for moving parts. Pushbroom sensors contain thousands of detectors,...

Accurate and fine-grained discovery by diverse Earth observation (EO) sensors ensures a comprehensive response to collaborative observation-required emergency tasks. This discovery remains a challenge in an EO sensor web environment. In this study, w...

The city of Staufen im Breisgau in southwest Germany suffers from a localized land uplift, which has occurred in the past six years in relation to geothermal drilling activities in 2007. So far, severe damages at 269 buildings have been recorded. The...