Land surface modeling informed by earth observation data: toward understanding blue–green–white water fluxes in High Mountain Asia

Mountains are important suppliers of freshwater to downstream areas, affecting large populations in particular in High Mountain Asia (HMA). Yet, the propagation of water from HMA headwaters to downstream areas is not fully understood, as interactions in the mountain water cycle between the cryo-, hydro- and biosphere remain elusive. We review...

A scalable software package for time series reconstruction of remote sensing datasets on the Google Earth Engine platform

Spatiotemporal residual noise in terrestrial earth observation products, often caused by unfavorable atmospheric conditions, impedes their broad applications. Most users prefer to use gap-filled remote sensing products with time series reconstruction (TSR) algorithms. Applying currently available implementations of TSR to large-volume...

Changes in glacier albedo and the driving factors in the Western Nyainqentanglha Mountains from 2001 to 2020

Glacier surface albedo dominates glacier energy balance, thus strongly affecting the glacier mass balance. Glaciers in the Western Nyainqentanglha Mountains (WNM) experienced large mass losses in the past two decades, but long-term changes of glacier albedo and its drivers are less understood. In this study, we retrieved glacier albedo with...

Analyzing the inundation pattern of the Poyang Lake floodplain by passive microwave data

The soil wetness condition is a useful indicator of inundation hazard in floodplains, such as the Poyang Lake floodplain. Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I) passive microwave data were used to monitor water-saturated soil and open water areas of the Poyang Lake floodplain from 2001 to 2008, capturing the inundation patterns of this area in...

Estimation of Aerodynamic Roughness Length over Oasis in the Heihe River Basin by Utilizing Remote Sensing and Ground Data

Most land surface models require information on aerodynamic roughness length and its temporal and spatial variability. This research presents a practical approach for determining the aerodynamic roughness length at fine temporal and spatial resolution over the landscape by combining remote sensing and ground measurements. The basic framework of...

Monitoring of irrigation schemes by remote sensing: Phenology versus retrieval of biophysical variables

The appraisal of crop water requirements (CWR) is crucial for the management of water resources, especially in arid and semi-arid regions where irrigation represents the largest consumer of water, such as the Doukkala area, western Morocco. Simple and (semi) empirical approaches have been applied to estimate CWR: the first one is called Kc-NDVI...

Parameterization of Surface Roughness Based on ICESat/GLAS Full Waveforms: A Case Study on the Tibetan Plateau

Glaciers in the Tibetan mountains are expected to be sensitive to turbulent sensible and latent heat fluxes. One of the most significant factors of the energy exchange between the atmospheric boundary layer and the glacier is the roughness of the glacier surface. However, methods to parameterize this roughness for glacier surfaces in remote...

Fire risk assessment: The role of hyperspectral remote sensing

The increasing demand for effective forest fire prevention instruments has faced operational and future Earth observation instruments with the challenge of producing updated and reliable maps of vegetation moisture. Various empirical band-ratio indexes have been proposed so far, based on multispectral remote sensing data, that have been found to...