Remote Sensing, Volume 8, Issue 5

Satellite-derived vegetation phenophases are frequently used to study the response of ecosystems to climate change. However, limited studies have identified the common phenological variability across different climate and vegetation zones. Using NOAA...

Land-use classification from remote sensing images has become an important but challenging task. This paper proposes Hierarchical Coding Vectors (HCV), a novel representation based on hierarchically coding structures, for scene level land-use classif...

The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Multi-Satellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA) products have been widely used, but their error and uncertainty characteristics over diverse climate regimes still need to be quantified. In this study, we f...

Mascon modeling is used in this paper to produce the mass flux solutions in the Tibetan Plateau. In the mascon modeling, the pseudo observations and their covariance matrices are derived from the GRACE monthly gravity field models. The sampling densi...

We estimated surface salinity flux and solar penetration from satellite data, and performed model simulations to examine the impact of including the satellite estimates on temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen distributions on the Louisiana con...

Rice is an important food crop and a large producer of green-house relevant methane. Accurate and timely maps of paddy fields are most important in the context of food security and greenhouse gas emission modelling. During their life-cycle, rice plan...

The nonuniformity of the spatial response to surface radiation is a fundamental characteristic of all airborne and spaceborne sensors that inevitably introduces uncertainty into the estimation of object proportions by the spectral unmixing of mixed p...

The successful launch of the Chinese high spatial resolution hyperspectral satellite TianGong-1 (TG-1) opens up new possibilities for applications of remotely-sensed satellite imagery. One of the main goals of the TG-1 mission is to provide observati...

Cultural heritage sites are rare and irreplaceable wealth of human civilization. The majority of them are becoming unstable due to a combination of human and natural disturbances. High-precision, efficient deformation monitoring facilitates the early...

All four chimpanzee sub-species populations are declining due to multiple factors including human-caused habitat loss. Effective conservation efforts are therefore needed to ensure their long-term survival. Habitat suitability models serve as useful...

To improve the understanding of water–vegetation relationships, direct comparative studies assessing the utility of satellite remotely sensed soil moisture, gridded precipitation products, and land surface model output are needed. A case study was in...

Achieving more timely, accurate and transparent information on the distribution and dynamics of the world’s land cover is essential to understanding the fundamental characteristics, processes and threats associated with human-nature-climate interacti...

This is the second part of a study on how temporal sampling frequency affects satellite retrievals in support of the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) mission. Continuing from Part 1, which looked at Earth’s radiation budget, this paper present...

As a nondestructive geophysical tool, Ground penetrating radar (GPR) has been applied in tree root study in recent years. With increasing amounts of GPR data collected for roots, it is imperative to develop an efficient automatic recognition of roots...

Monitoring the spatio-temporal development of vegetation is a challenging task in heterogeneous and cloud-prone landscapes. No single satellite sensor has thus far been able to provide consistent time series of high temporal and spatial resolution fo...

Image registration is an essential step in the process of image fusion, environment surveillance and change detection. Finding correct feature matches during the registration process proves to be difficult, especially for remote sensing images with l...

Continuous satellite-derived cloud records now extend over three decades, and are increasingly used for climate applications. Certain applications, such as trend detection, require a clear understanding of uncertainty as it relates to establishing st...

Understanding the atmospheric distribution of water (H ${}_2$ O) is crucial for global warming studies and climate change mitigation. In this context, reliable satellite data are extremely valuable for their global and continuous coverage, once the...

Seismic data are primarily used in studies of the Earth’s inner structure. Since large parts of the world are not yet sufficiently covered by seismic surveys, products from the Earth’s satellite observation systems have more often been used for this...

Information extraction and three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of buildings using the vehicle-borne laser scanning (VLS) system is significant for many applications. Extracting LiDAR points, from VLS, belonging to various types of building in large...

The time lag between anomalies in precipitation and vegetation activity plays a critical role in early drought detection as agricultural droughts are caused by precipitation shortages. The aim of this study is to explore a new approach to estimate th...

Regionally calibrated algorithms for water quality are strongly needed, especially for optically complex waters such as coastal areas in the Arabian Gulf. In this study, a regional qualitative algorithm was proposed to retrieve seawater transparency,...

Diatoms are the major marine primary producers in the Southern Ocean and a key component of the carbon and silicate biogeochemical cycle. Using 15 years of satellite-derived diatom concentration from September to April (1997–2012), we examine the mea...

A new approach for three-dimensional (3-D) reconstruction of building roofs from airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data is proposed, and it includes four steps. Building roof points are first extracted from LiDAR data by using the reversed...

This study developed an approach for remote estimation of Vegetation Fraction (VF) and Flower Fraction (FF) in oilseed rape, which is a crop species with conspicuous flowers during reproduction. Canopy reflectance in green, red, red edge and NIR band...

The fine-mode fraction (FMF) of aerosol optical depth (AOD) is a key optical parameter that represents the proportion of fine particles relative to total aerosols in the atmosphere. However, in comparison to ground-based measurements, the FMF is stil...

Producing a global and comprehensive description of atmospheric aerosols requires integration of ground-based, airborne, satellite and model datasets. Due to its complexity, aerosol monitoring requires the use of several data records with complementa...

Surface Urban Heat Island (SUHI) is a phenomenon of high spatial and temporal variability. However, studies that investigate urban land surface temperature (LST) observed in different seasons frequently utilize a single satellite measurement and do n...

We describe the design, implementation and performance of a novel airborne system, which integrates commercial waveform LiDAR, CCD (Charge-Coupled Device) camera and hyperspectral sensors into a common platform system. CAF’s (The Chinese Academy of F...

Sun-induced canopy chlorophyll fluorescence in both the red (F_R) and far-red (F_FR) regions was estimated across a range of temporal scales and a range of species from different plant functional types using high resolution radiance spectra collected o...

WFV (Wide Field of View) cameras on-board Gaofen-1 satellite (gaofen means high resolution) provide unparalleled global observations with both high spatial and high temporal resolutions. However, the accuracy of the radiometric calibration remains un...

Since 2005, the Land Surface Analysis Satellite Application Facility (LSA SAF) operationally retrieves Land Surface Temperature (LST) for the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI) on board Meteosat Second Generation (MSG). The high t...

This paper presents a Python QGIS (PyQGIS) plugin, which has been developed for the purpose of producing Land Surface Temperature (LST) maps from Landsat 5 TM, Landsat 7 ETM+ and Landsat 8 TIRS, Thermal Infrared (TIR) imagery. The plugin has been dev...

MOD17A2 provides near real-time estimates of gross primary production (GPP) globally. In this study, MOD17A2 GPP was evaluated using eddy covariance (EC) flux measurements at eight sites in five various biome types across China. The sensitivity of MO...

Northeast China is located at high northern latitudes and is a typical region of relatively high sensitivity to global climate change. Studies of the land surface phenology in Northeast China and its response to climate change are important for under...

Land use transition in dryland ecosystems is one of the major driving forces to landscape change that directly impacts the welfare of humans. In this study, the support vector machine (SVM) classification algorithm and cross tabulation matrix analysi...

This work presents an investigation to determine ground deformation based on an integration of DInSAR Time-Series (DTS) and Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) techniques aiming at detecting high rates of linear and non-linear ground movement....

Wetlands are considered a challenging environment for mapping approaches based on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data due to their often complex internal structures and the diverse backscattering mechanisms caused by vegetation, soil moisture and flo...

This work introduces a new classification method in the remote sensing domain, suitably adapted to dealing with the challenges posed by the big data processing and analytics framework. The method is based on symbolic learning techniques, and it is de...

Surface roughness parameters, such as roughness length and displacement height, impact the estimation of surface moisture, and the frontal areas of buildings and trees are two components that contribute to surface roughness in urban areas. Research o...

Fire detection based on multi-temporal remote sensing data is an active research field. However, multi-temporal detection processes are usually complicated because of the spatial and temporal variability of remote sensing imagery. This paper presents...

Brazil and China have a long-term joint space based sensor program called China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS). The most recent satellite of this program (CBERS-4) was successfully launched on 7 December 2014. This work describes a complete...

The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) have gained considerable attention in ecological research and management as proxies for landscape-scale vegetation quantity and quality. In the Greater Yellowst...

Land monitoring using temporal series of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images requires radiometrically well calibrated sensors. In this paper, the radiometric stability of the new SAR Sentinel-1A “S-1A” sensor was first assessed by analyzing tempora...

Due to expected climate change and increased focus on forests as a potential carbon sink, it is of interest to map and monitor even marginal forests where trees exist close to their tolerance limits, such as small pioneer trees in the forest-tundra e...

Landslides are one of the most destructive geo-hazards that can bring about great threats to both human lives and infrastructures. Landslide monitoring has been always a research hotspot. In particular, landslide simulation experimentation is an effe...

Multiyear ice (MYI) concentration can be retrieved from passive or active microwave remote sensing observations. One of the algorithms that combines both observations is the Environmental Canada Ice Concentration Extractor (ECICE). However, factors s...

Roadway pavement surface distress information is critical for effective pavement asset management, and subsequently, transportation management agencies at all levels (i.e., federal, state, and local) dedicate a large amount of time and money to routi...

This study focuses on analyzing the changes to aerosol properties caused by the dust storm called “China’s Great Wall of Dust” that originated from the Taklimakan Desert in April 2014. IDDI (Infrared Difference Dust Index) images from FY-2E and true...

The first Chinese operational Ku-band scatterometer on board Haiyang-2A (HY-2A), launched in August 2011, is designed for monitoring the global ocean surface wind. This study estimates the quality of the near-real-time (NRT) retrieval wind speed and...