Remote Sensing, Volume 8, Issue 4

Amazon forests experienced two severe droughts at the beginning of the 21st century: one in 2005 and the other in 2010. How Amazon forests responded to these droughts is critical for the future of the Earth’s climate system. It is only possible to as...

This paper introduces a new supervised classification method for hyperspectral images that combines spectral and spatial information. A support vector machine (SVM) classifier, integrated with a subspace projection method to address the problems of m...

In recent decades, plastic-mulched farmland has expanded rapidly in China as well as in the rest of the world because it results in marked increases of crop production. However, plastic-mulched farmland significantly influences the environment and ha...

Monitoring open water bodies accurately is an important and basic application in remote sensing. Various water body mapping approaches have been developed to extract water bodies from multispectral images. The method based on the spectral water index...

Long-term high-quality global leaf area index (LAI) and fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (FAPAR) products are urgently needed for the study of global change, climate modeling, and many other problems. As the successor of the M...

Multiple endmember spectral mixture analysis (MESMA) has been widely applied for estimating fractional land covers from remote sensing imagery. MESMA has proven effective in addressing inter-class and intra-class endmember variability by allowing pix...

The process of the surface urban heat island (SUHI) varies with latitude, climate, topography and meteorological conditions. This study investigated the seasonal variability of SUHI in the Tehran metropolitan area, Iran, with respect to selected surf...

Several frequency-based spectral similarity measures, derived from commonly-used ones, are developed for hyperspectral image classification based on the frequency domain. Since the frequency spectrum (magnitude spectrum) of the original signature for...

Remotely sensed rainfall is increasingly being used to manage climate-related risk in gauge sparse regions. Applications based on such data must make maximal use of the skill of the methodology in order to avoid doing harm by providing misleading inf...

Recently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) performed sea surface temperature (SST) reanalysis (RAN1) from seven AVHRR/3s onboard NOAA-15 to -19 and Metop-A and -B, from 2002–present. Operational L1b data were used as input....

Hickory plantations play an important role in improving local farmers’ economic conditions, but extreme drought in July–August 2013 seriously influenced hickory nut production. It is necessary to understand the extent and magnitude of this drought-in...

The effects of ground deformation pose a significant geo-hazard to the environment and infrastructure in Wuhan, the most populous city in Central China, in the eastern Jianghan Plain at the intersection of the Yangtze and Han rivers. Prior to this st...

The Cat Ba National Park area (Vietnam) with its tropical forest is recognized as being part of the world biodiversity conservation by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and is a well-known destination for t...

The Sentinel satellite constellation series, developed and operated by the European Space Agency, represents the dedicated space component of the European Copernicus program, committed to long-term operational services in environment, climate and sec...

Governments, aid organizations and researchers are struggling with the complexity of detecting and monitoring drought events, which leads to weaknesses regarding the translation of early warnings into action. Embedded in an advanced decision-support...

Assessing forest stand conditions in urban and peri-urban areas is essential to support ecosystem service planning and management, as most of the ecosystem services provided are a consequence of forest stand characteristics. However, collecting data...

In response to the increasing need for fast satellite image processing SPACE-SI developed STORM—a fully automatic image processing chain that performs all processing steps from the input optical images to web-delivered map-ready products for various...

Successful determination of soil texture using reflectance spectroscopy across Visible and Near-Infrared (VNIR, 400–1200 nm) and Short-Wave-Infrared (SWIR, 1200–2500 nm) ranges depends largely on the selection of a suitable data mining algorithm. The...

In this study, subsidence patterns in the Historical Centre of Hanoi, Vietnam are mapped using the Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) technique, with particular emphasis on the stability of ancient monuments, historical buildings and ar...

Alpine wetlands in the Tibetan Plateau (TP) play a crucial role in the regional hydrological cycle due to their strong influence on surface ecohydrological processes; therefore, understanding how TP wetlands respond to climate change is essential for...

Polarimetric SAR images are a rich data source for crop mapping. However, quad-pol sensors have some limitations due to their complexity, increased data rate, and reduced coverage and revisit time. The main objective of this study was to evaluate the...

The fractional vegetation cover (FCover) is an essential biophysical variable and plays a critical role in the carbon cycle studies. Existing FCover products from satellite observations are spatially incomplete and temporally discontinuous, and also...

The small Baseline Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Interferometry (SBI) technique has been widely and successfully applied in various ground deformation monitoring applications. Over the last decade, a variety of SBI algorithms have been developed bas...

This review paper discusses how to develop, produce, sustain, and serve satellite climate data records (CDRs) in the context of transitioning research to operation (R2O). Requirements and critical procedures of producing various CDRs, including Funda...

The Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (SNPP) satellite was launched on 28 October, 2011, and carries the Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS) onboard. Currently, ATMS performance in orbit is very stable and the calibration parameters...

Automated individual tree crown detection and delineation (ITCD) using remotely sensed data plays an increasingly significant role in efficiently, accurately, and completely monitoring forests. This paper reviews trends in ITCD research from 1990–201...

Hyperspectral remote sensing is an effective tool to discriminate plant species, providing vast potential to trace plant invasions for ecological assessments. However, necessary baseline information for the use of remote sensing data is missing for m...

This study evaluates the new Aqua MODIS Dark Target (DT) Collection 6 (C6) Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) (MYD04_3K) retrieval algorithm at 3 km resolution over Asian countries that have recently experienced severe and increasing air pollution. Retrieva...

The availability of high-resolution remote sensing (HRRS) data has opened up the possibility for new interesting applications, such as per-pixel classification of individual objects in greater detail. This paper shows how a convolutional neural netwo...

Canopy height is one of the strongest predictors of biomass and carbon in forested ecosystems. Additionally, mangrove ecosystems represent one of the most concentrated carbon reservoirs that are rapidly degrading as a result of deforestation, develop...

The diurnal cycle of upper tropospheric humidity (UTH) is known to be influenced by such processes as convection and the formation of clouds which are parameterized in current global climate models. In this study, we evaluate the performance of two c...

Each wildfire has its own “history”, burns under specific conditions and leads to unique environmental impacts. Information on where and when it has started and its duration is important to improve understanding on the dynamics of individual wildfire...

Leaf area index (LAI) is an important biophysical trait for forest ecosystem and ecological modeling, as it plays a key role for the forest productivity and structural characteristics. The ground-based methods like the handheld optical instruments fo...

Based on an optimal estimation method, an algorithm was developed to retrieve the column-averaged dry-air mole fraction of carbon dioxide (XCO₂) using Shortwave Infrared (SWIR) channels, referred to as the Yonsei CArbon Retrieval (YCAR) algorithm. Th...

Remote sensing reflectance (R_rs) classification of coastal waters is a useful tool to monitor environmental processes and manage marine environmental resources. This study presents classification work for data sets that were collected in the Yellow S...

On 16 September 2015, a Mw 8.3 interplate thrust earthquake ruptured offshore the Illapel region (Chile). Here, we perform coseismic slip fault modeling based on multi-orbit Sentinel 1-A (S1A) data. To do this, we generate ascending and descending S1...

Malaria remains one of the most common vector-borne diseases in the world and the definition of novel control strategies can benefit from the modeling of transmission processes. However, data-driven models are often difficult to build, as data are ve...

Traditional classification accuracy assessments based on summary statistics from a confusion matrix furnish a global (location invariant) view of classification accuracy. To estimate the spatial distribution of classification accuracy, a geostatistic...

In response to its users’ needs, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) initiated reanalysis (RAN) of the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) Global Area Coverage (GAC; 4 km) sea surface temperature (SST) data employi...

Satellite altimetry is the only method to monitor global changes in sea-ice thickness and volume over decades. Such missions (e.g., ERS, Envisat, ICESat, CryoSat-2) are based on the conversion of freeboard into thickness by assuming hydrostatic equil...

Stable imaging of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) photogrammetry system is an important issue that affects the data processing and application of the system. Compared with traditional aerial images, the large rotation of roll, pitch, and yaw angles...

Hyperspectral remote-sensing in the reflected infrared and thermal infrared regions offers a unique and efficient alternative for mineral mapping, as most minerals exhibit spectral features in these regions, mainly in the shortwave and longwave infra...

Land cover data derived from satellites are commonly used to prescribe inputs to models of the land surface. Since such data inevitably contains errors, quantifying how uncertainties in the data affect a model’s output is important. To do so, a spati...

Accurate rainfall estimations based on ground-based rainfall observations and satellite-based rainfall measurements are essential for hydrological and environmental modeling in the Qaidam Basin of China. We evaluated the accuracy of daily and monthly...

Crop extent and frequency maps are an important input to inform the debate around land value and competitive land uses, in particular between cropping and mining in the case of Queensland, Australia. Such spatial datasets are useful for supporting de...

Spatiotemporal deformation of existing sinkholes and the surrounding region in Wink, TX are probed using time-series interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) methods with radar images acquired from the Sentinel-1A satellite launched in April...

Land cover mapping in mountainous areas is a notoriously challenging task due to the rugged terrain and high spatial heterogeneity of land surfaces as well as the frequent cloud contamination of satellite imagery. Taking Southwestern China (a typical...

Mountainous areas with rugged terrains are widely distributed around the world. Remotely sensed values of the fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (FAPAR) suffer from the effect of rugged terrain. In this study, the effect of rugg...

The fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (FAPAR) is a critical biophysical parameter in eco-environmental studies. Scaling of FAPAR from the field observation to the satellite pixel is essential for validating remote sensing FAPAR...

Urban fringe is the transition zone fine grained with urban and non-urban land cover types. The complex landscape mosaic in this area challenges the land cover classification based on the remote-sensing data. Spectral signatures are not efficient to...