Remote sensing-based prediction of forest fire characteristics

Forest fires are a major ecosystem disturbance at global scale, put pressure on agencies in charge of citizens and infrastructure security and cause unvaluable human losses. Fires are controlled by multiple static and dynamic drivers related to topography, land cover, climate, weather, and anthropic activity. Among these, weather is an active...

Information extraction and dimensionality reduction of hyperspectral datasets through spectral region analyses

Hyperspectral images present detailed spectral information of every pixel in<br/>the images where the spectral signal is sampled in hundreds of narrow and<br/>contiguous spectral channels, usually covering the 400-2500 nm spectral region<br/>where sunlight reflected by the Earth can be measured. Earth observation systems<br/>acquire spectral...

Retrieval of Aerosol Optical Depth Over Land by Inverse Modeling of Multi-Source Satellite Data

The Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD), a measure of the scattering and absorption of light by aerosols, has been extensively used for scientific research such as monitoring air quality near the surface due to fine particles aggregated, aerosol radiative forcing (cooling effect against the warming effect by carbon dioxide CO2 ), aerosol long-term trend...

Applications of passive microwave data to monitor inundated areas and model stream flow

The observation of surface water bodies in all weather conditions and better knowledge about inundation patterns are important for water resource management and flood early warning. Microwave radiometers at 37 GHz were applied to observe and study the inundation pattern in large subtropical floodplains in China, i.e. the Poyang Lake and Dongting...

Scalable information extraction from point cloud data obtained by mobile laser scanner

The rise of intelligent transportation, autonomous driving and 3D virtual cities demands highly accurate and regularly updated 2D and 3D maps. However, traditional surveying andmapping techniques are inadequate as they are labor intensive and cost inefficient. Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) systems, which combine Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)...

Observing surface properties of glaciers: A case study in the Nyainqêntanglha Range, Tibetan Plateau

The geometry of terrestrial laser scanning; identification of errors, modeling and mitigation of scanning geometry

Over the past few decades, Terrestrial Laser Scanners are increasingly being used in a broad spectrum of applications, from surveying to civil engineering, medical modeling and forensics. Especially surveying applications require on one hand a quickly obtainable, high resolution point cloud but also need observations with a well described...

Observing at-surface irradiance and albedo from space: The Tibet experiment

Monitoring the solar radiation budget on a daily basis is a prerequisite to study land surface processes, especially in climatology and hydrology, and in derived applications like drought early warning. Current space-born radiometers can provide daily observations to derive surface radiative fluxes at a spatial resolution of one square kilometer...

Retrieval of vegetation properties using Top of Atmosphere radiometric data: A multi-sensor approach

Vegetation is the main source of primary production and plays an important role inmodeling the exchanges of energy and mass of carbon, oxygen and water between the earth and the atmosphere. Mapping andmonitoring of vegetation canopies are crucial for various applications including agro-ecosystem models, climatology modeling, crop growth modeling...

Reconstruction of gap-free time series satellite observations of land surface temperature to model spectral soil thermal admittance

The soil thermal properties (soil thermal conductivity, soil heat capacity and soil diffusivity) are the main parameters in the applications that need quantitative information on soil heat transfer. Conventionally, these properties are either measured in situ or estimated by semi-empirical models using the fractions of soil constituents. The use...

Observing changes in lake level and glacial thickness on the Tibetan Plateau with the ICESat laser altimeter

Multi-sensor remote sensing parameterization of heat fluxes over heterogeneous land surfaces

The parameterization of heat transfer by remote sensing, and based on SEBS scheme for turbulent heat fluxes retrieval, already proved to be very convenient for estimating evapotranspiration (ET) over homogeneous land surfaces. However, the use of such a method over heterogeneous landscapes (e.g. semi-arid regions or agricultural land) becomes...

Multiplatform observations for measuring wetland landscape topography

Estimation of Composite Hydrodynamic Roughness Over Land with High Density Airborne Laser Scanning

Revealing the skeleton from imperfect point clouds

Quantifying our surrounding environment in terms of sizes and orders has always been of interest, because it enables us to visualize, describe and interpret our environment. In the last decade terrestrial laser scanners became available as a tool to measure objects in our surrounding environment. Terrestrial laser scanning samples surfaces with...

A System for the Acquisition and Analysis of Image Sequences to Model Longitudinal Driving Behavior

Traffic causes important problems in many societies. Considerable amounts of energy, money and time are wasted in traffic jams and even more important are car accidents and casualties in traffic (more than 40,000 deaths per year in the USA (Hitti (2005)) and 791 deaths in 2007 in the Netherlands (van Verkeer en Waterstaat (2008))). To alleviate...