**About the Editors**

**Jean-Louis Roujean** has received a Ph.D. degree in environmental science with specialty remote sensing from the University Paul Sabatier in Toulouse in 1991. His domain of expertise concerns the use of remote-sensing observations for studies of surface–atmosphere interactions involved in weather forecast and climate modeling. He worked on the development of an optical radiation transfer codes for vegetation and led ground experiments to measure the biophysical parameters during international field campaigns (HAPEX-Sahel, 1992; BOREAS, 1994). Emphasis is placed on the Bi-directional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) and scaling issues and the search for a new strategy of model inversion for the retrieval of biophysical parameters. Among the many applications are satellites techniques and time series analysis methods. He coordinated the short-wave radiation branch of Satellite Application Facilities (SAF) on Land Surface Analysis, a program supported by EUMETSAT to exploit data from MSG and EPS sensor systems responsible for the development and the operational implementation of processing algorithms for albedo and down-welling surface radiation. Other domains of interest are land cover mapping, assimilation of surface parameters, data fusion and aerosol retrieval. He was the PI of the Snow Reflectance Transition Experiment (SNORTEX) project aiming to study the characteristics of the angular and spectral signatures of snow-forest in Finnish Lapland based on ground, airborne and satellite measurements. He was also responsible for the development of surface albedo algorithms for the Copernicus Global Land Service program using PROBA-V (a SPOT-VGT follow-on) observations, with an operational implementation at VITO. He was PI of the Agricultural Health Spectrometry (AHSPECT) experiment consisting of acquiring airborne hyper-spectral measurements over crops and forested areas in southwestern France, and is leading the Centre d'Expertise Scientifique (CES) Albedo of the French data center THEIA, which concerns high-resolution products from Sentinel-2 and Landsat. He is president of the national committee on land surface remote-sensing, under the auspices of CNES, the French space agency. For CNES, he is Principal Investigator (PI) of the Indo-French space mission Thermal Infrared Imaging Satellite for High-Resolution Natural Resources Assessment (THRISHNA) devoted to acquiring high-resolution data in optical and thermal domains from 2025.

**Shunlin Liang** received a Ph.D. degree in remote-sensing and GIS from Boston University, Boston, MA. He was a Postdoctoral Research Associate with Boston University from 1992 to 1993 and a Validation Scientist with the NOAA/NASA Pathfinder AVHRR Land Project from 1993 to 1994. He is currently a professor. His main research interests focus on estimation of land surface variables from satellite observations, studies on surface energy balance, and assessing the climatic, ecological and hydrological impacts of afforestation in China. He has published about 200 peer-reviewed journal papers, and authored the book *Quantitative Remote Sensing of Land Surfaces* (Wiley, 2004), co-athored the book *Global LAnd Surface Satellite (GLASS) Products: Algorithms, Validation and Analysis* (Springer, 2013)), and edited the book *Advances in Land Remote Sensing: System, Modeling, Inversion and Application* (Springer, 2008), and co-edited the books *Advanced Remote Sensing: Terrestrial Information Extraction and Applications* (Academic Press, 2012) and *Land Surface Observation, Modeling and Data Asssimilation* (World Scientific, 2013). Dr. Liang was a co-chairman of the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Commission VII/I Working Group on Fundamental Physics and Modeling, and an Associate Editor of *IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing* (2001–2013), as well as a gues<sup>t</sup> editor of several remote sensing journals.

**Tao He** received a B.E. degree in photogrammetry and remote sensing from Wuhan University, Wuhan, China, in 2006, and a Ph.D. degree in geography from the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA, in 2012. He is currently a Professor with the School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University. His research interests include surface anisotropy and albedo modeling, data fusion of satellite products, and long-term regional and global surface radiation budget analysis.
