Remote Sensing, Volume 7, Issue 5

Mean Annual Precipitation is one of the most important variables used in water resource management. However, quantifying Mean Annual Precipitation at high spatial resolution, needed for advanced hydrological analysis, is challenging in developing cou...

This study analyzed the scaling problem of land surface temperature (LST) data retrieved with the Temperature Emissivity Separation (TES) algorithm. We compiled a remotely sensed dataset that included Thermal Airborne Hyperspectral Imager (TASI) and...

Lidar data provide both geometric and radiometric information. Radiometric information is influenced by sensor and target factors and should be calibrated to obtain consistent energy responses. The radiometric correction of airborne lidar system (ALS...

The paper reports the recent progress in the radiative transfer model (RTM) development, which serves as the observation operator of a Land Data Assimilation System (LDAS), and its validation at two Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL) stations with differ...

The applications of object-based image analysis (OBIA) in remote sensing studies of wetlands have been growing over recent decades, addressing tasks from detection and delineation of wetland bodies to comprehensive analyses of within-wetland cover ty...

It remains a challenging issue to accurately estimate the fraction of absorbed photosynthetically-active radiation (FPAR) using remote sensing data, as the direct and diffuse radiation reaching the vegetation canopy have different effects for FPAR. I...

This study presents a revised temporal scaling method based on a detection algorithm for the temporal stability of the evaporative fraction (EF) to estimate total daytime evapotranspiration (ET) at a regional scale. The study area is located in the H...

In this paper, grid cell based spatial statistics were used to quantify the drivers of land-cover and land-use change (LCLUC) and habitat degradation in a tropical rainforest in Madagascar. First, a spectral database of various land-cover and land-us...

Endmember selection is the basis for sub-pixel land cover classifications using multiple endmember spectral mixture analysis (MESMA) that adopts variant endmember matrices for each pixel to mitigate errors caused by endmember variability in SMA. A s...

Optical remotely sensed images in mountainous areas are subject to radiometric distortions induced by topographic effects, which need to be corrected before quantitative applications. Based on Li model and Sandmeier model, this paper proposed an impr...

In order to investigate the aerosol variability over the southwest region of Slovenia, an ultraviolet scanning elastic backscatter LiDAR was utilized to make the vertical scan for atmospheric probing. With the assumption of horizontal atmospheric hom...

Airborne LiDAR Bathymetry (ALB) has been rapidly evolving in recent years and now allows fluvial topography to be mapped in high resolution (>20 points/m²) and height accuracy (<10 cm) for both the aquatic and the riparian area. This article pr...

Introduced in 2011, the supervised vicarious calibration (SVC) approach is a promising approach to radiometric calibration and atmospheric correction of airborne hyperspectral (HRS) data. This paper presents a comprehensive study by which the SVC met...

The Medium-Resolution Spectral Imager (MERSI) is one of the major payloads of China’s second-generation polar-orbiting meteorological satellite, FengYun-3 (FY-3), and it is similar to the Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). The MER...

An improved aerosol retrieval algorithm based on the Advanced Multi-angular Polarized Radiometer (AMPR) is presented to illustrate the utility of additional 1640-nm observations for measuring aerosol optical depth (AOD) over land using look-up table...

Shallow lakes, with depths less than ca. 3.5–4 m, are a ubiquitous feature of the Arctic Alaskan Coastal Plain, covering up to 40% of the land surface. With such an extended areal coverage, lakes and their ice regimes represent an important component...

Accurate and up-to-date mapping and monitoring of rubber plantations is challenging. In this study, we presented a simple method for rapidly and accurately mapping rubber plantations in the Xishuangbanna region of southwest China using phenology-base...

Clay content (fraction < 2 µm) is one of the most important soil properties. It controls soil hydraulic properties like wilting point, field capacity and saturated hydraulic conductivity, which in turn control the various fluxes of water in the un...

A segmentation-based fully-polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) image classification method that incorporates texture features and color features is designed and implemented. This method is based on the framework that conjunctively uses sta...

The main requirement for preserving European hay meadows in good condition is through prerequisite cut management. However, monitoring these practices on a larger scale is very difficult. Our study analyses the use of MODIS vegetation indices product...

In this study, urban growth of the Atakum District in Samsun, Turkey, was simulated by Cellular Automata-Markov Chain (CA-MC) and Multi-layer Perceptron-Markov Chain (MLP-MC) hybrid models in a geographical information system (GIS) environment. Histo...

Regional analysis of water use efficiency (WUE) is a relevant method for diagnosing the performance of irrigation systems in water-limited environments. In this study, we investigated the potential of FORMOSAT-2 images to provide spatial estimates of...

Segmentation, which is usually the first step in object-based image analysis (OBIA), greatly influences the quality of final OBIA results. In many existing multi-scale segmentation algorithms, a common problem is that under-segmentation and over-segm...

This paper presents a method of estimating regional distributions of surface air temperature (T_a) and surface vapor pressure (e_a), which uses remotely-sensed data and meteorological data as its inputs. The method takes into account the effects of bot...

MODIS enhanced vegetation index (EVI) and land surface temperature (LST) are key indicators for monitoring vegetation cover changes in broad ecosystems. However, there has been little evaluation of these indices for detecting changes in a range of la...

The characterization of plant nutrients is important to understand the process of plant growth in natural ecosystems. This study attempted to evaluate the performances of univariate linear regression with various vegetation indices (VIs) and multivar...

Soil and vegetation component temperatures in non-isothermal pixels encapsulate more physical meaning and are more applicable than composite temperatures. The component temperatures however are difficult to be obtained from thermal infrared (TIR) rem...

Spatially explicit precipitation data is often responsible for the prediction accuracy of hydrological and ecological models. Several statistical downscaling approaches have been developed to map precipitation at a high spatial resolution, which are...

Water vapor, as one of the most important greenhouse gases, is crucial for both climate and atmospheric studies. Considering the high spatial and temporal variations of water vapor, a timely and accurate retrieval of precipitable water vapor (PWV) is...

The 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake induced landslides that destroyed large swaths of mountain vegetation. Presently, the damaged vegetation areas are exhibiting various stages of recovery depending on environments. A spatial analysis of earthquake-damaged...

Sample data plays an important role in land cover (LC) map validation. Traditionally, they are collected through field survey or image interpretation, either of which is costly, labor-intensive and time-consuming. In recent years, massive geo-tagged...

For more than a decade, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) has used in-situ observations of 2 m temperature and 2 m relative humidity to operationally constrain the temporal evolution of model soil moisture. These observat...

Mapping agricultural crops is an important application of remote sensing. However, in many cases it is based either on hyperspectral imagery or on multitemporal coverage, both of which are difficult to scale up to large-scale deployment at high spati...

This paper describes an automatic mosaicking algorithm for creating large-scale mosaic maps of forest height. In contrast to existing mosaicking approaches through using SAR backscatter power and/or InSAR phase, this paper utilizes the forest height...

An efficient means to map tree plantations is needed to detect tropical land use change and evaluate reforestation projects. To analyze recent tree plantation expansion in northeastern Costa Rica, we examined the potential of combining moderate-resol...

TRMM Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA) satellite precipitation products have been utilized to quantify, forecast, or understand precipitation patterns, climate change, hydrologic models, and drought in numerous scientific investigations....

Fractional vegetation cover (FVC) is one of the most critical parameters in monitoring vegetation status. Comprehensive assessment of the FVC products is critical for their improvement and use in land surface models. This study investigates the perfo...

Quantifying roughness effects on ground surface emissivity is an important step in obtaining high-quality soil moisture products from large-scale passive microwave sensors. In this study, we used a semi-empirical method to evaluate roughness effects...

Monitoring surface albedo at medium-to-fine resolution (<100 m) has become increasingly important for medium-to-fine scale applications and coarse-resolution data evaluation. This paper presents a method for estimating surface albedo directly usin...

Vessel monitoring is one of the most important maritime applications of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. Because of the dihedral reflections between the vessel hull and sea surface and the trihedral reflections among superstructures, vessels usua...

Forest aboveground biomass (AGB) was mapped throughout China using large footprint LiDAR waveform data from the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) onboard NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), Moderate Resolution Imaging Spe...

In this paper, we describe the automatic extraction of centerlines of railroads. Mobile Laser Scanning systems are able to capture the 3D environment of the rail tracks with a high level of detail. Our approach first detects laser points that were re...

Automatic methods for an early detection of plant diseases (i.e., visible symptoms at early stages of disease development) using remote sensing are critical for precision crop protection. Verticillium wilt (VW) of olive caused by Verticillium dahliae...

The surveillance of maritime areas with remote sensing is vital for security reasons, as well as for the protection of the environment. Satellite-borne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) offers large-scale surveillance, which is not reliant on solar illu...

Shortly after the launch of ALOS PALSAR L-band SAR by the Japan Space Exploration Agency (JAXA), a program to develop an Earth Science Data Record (ESDR) for inundated wetlands was funded by NASA. Using established methodologies, extensive multi-temp...

Areas affected by land degradation in Sub-Saharan West Africa between 1982 and 2012 are identified using time-series analysis of vegetation index data derived from satellites. The residual trend (RESTREND) of a Normalized Difference Vegetation Index...

In-situ soil moisture was widely used to validate and calibrate the satellite-retrieved data of different footprints. However, it contained unavoidable uncertainty when used as spatial representative. This paper examined the uncertainty in pixel-wis...

Currently, accurate information on crop area coverage is vital for food security and industry, and there is strong demand for timely crop mapping. In this study, we used MODIS time series data to investigate the effect of the time series length on cr...

As a follow-up to the Best Paper Award of 2014, recognizing the most outstanding papers in the area of remote sensing techniques, design and applications published in Remote Sensing, we are pleased to announce the Remote Sensing Best Paper Award for...

Suspended sediment concentration (SSC) is one of the most critical parameters in ocean ecological environment evaluation and it can be determined using ocean color remote sensing (RS). The purpose of this study is to develop a model that provides a r...