Current, Planned, and Future Satellite Missions: Guidelines for Data Exploitation by the Remote Sensing Community

Dear Colleagues,

Articles written in tutorial style are becoming increasingly popular and denote a new trend in remote sensing (RS) publications. The large number of satellite missions currently in operation or to be launched in the near future is putting pressure on the RS user community (newcomers as well as experienced users) to keep up to date with the new technology advances and the vast variety of RS datasets and tools. It is difficult for scholars and practitioners, even for experts, to keep up with so many new and rapidly evolving scientific and technological developments, and to explore and exploit new types of data as they become available for science and applications.

In response to this trend, space agencies and data providers are embarking on an effort to provide not only the data but also the tools for users to visualize and explore such large volumes of data (through models and data assimilation or using big data, machine learning approaches). However, the diversity of satellite missions means that data types are handled by different processing centers and/or require different algorithms/approaches depending on the mission. Many applications require combinations of multiple datasets collected by a variety of satellite missions that are sometimes distributed by different agencies or research institutions. This may cause an additional problem, namely that data derived from the same source are mutually inconsistent due to different data processing strategies. Consequently, guidelines that ensure proper usage of the data, especially by inexperienced users, are becoming absolutely necessary.

Responding to this need for guidelines, we have set up a collection consisting of tutorial-style articles in the Satellite Missions for Earth and Planetary Exploration Section. Ideally, articles should be written by authors who are core scientists of satellite instruments/missions, or close to the science/management teams associated to each mission. While guidelines about characteristics and potential applications of recent/future satellite missions are welcome, tutorials on the synergistic usage of products from multiple missions are also encouraged.

We believe that tutorial-style articles would provide proper guidance for the increasing number of remote sensing data users. We hope that this collection will provide a forum to disseminate precise and rigorous information about current and future satellite missions.

Prof. Dr. Jose Moreno
Dr. Magaly Koch
Prof. Dr. Robert Wang
Collection Editors

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