Human activities modulate the impact of environmental forcing in general and of climate in particular. Information on the spatial and temporal patterns of human activities is in high demand, but scarce in sparsely populated and data-poor regions such as Northern Africa. The intensity and spatial distribution of nighttime lights provide useful information on human activities and can be observed by space-borne imaging radiometers. Our study helps to bridge the gap between the DMSP–OLS data available until 2013 and the NPP–VIIRS data available since 2013. The approach to calibrate the OLS data includes three steps: a) inter-calibrate the OLS DN data acquired by different sensors in 1992–2013; b) calibrate the OLS DN data using VIIRS data in 2013; c) generate synthetic OLS radiance data by degrading the VIIRS data in 2013–2020. We generated a) a time series of calibrated OLS nighttime light radiance data (1992–2013); b) mean annual VIIRS radiance on stable lights at the OLS spatial resolution for 2013–2020; c) synthetic OLS radiance data generated using VIIRS radiance data degraded to match the radiometric specifications of OLS for 2013–2020. The evaluation of these data products in 2013 documented their accuracy and consistency.

The Pan-Eurasian and African Continents are characterized by large ranges of climates varying from humid, semi-humid, semi-arid and arid regions, and great challenges exist in water allocation for different sectors that related to water resource and food security, which depends strongly on the water use information. Quantitative information on water use is also important to understand the effectiveness of water allocation and further to prevent from water stress resulted by drought in water-scarce regions. Explosive development of satellite remote sensing observations provide great chance to provide useful spatiotemporal information for quantifying the water use at regional to global scales. In this paper, a process-based model ETMonitor was used in combination with biophysical and hydrological parameters retrieved from earth observations to estimate the actual evapotranspiration, i.e. the agricultural and ecological water use. The total water use is also partitioned into beneficial part, e.g. plant transpiration, and non-beneficial part, e.g. soil evaporation and canopy rainfall interception, according to the water accounting framework. The estimated water use show good agreements with the ground observation, indicating the ability of ETMonitor for global and continental scale water use estimation. The spatial and temporal patterns of the water use in the Pan-Eurasian and African Continents were further analysed, while large spatial variation of water use was convinced. Current study also highlights the great capability of satellite observations in studying the regional water resource and continental water cycle.

Snow sublimation is an important hydrological process and its spatial and temporal variation remains largely unknown; however, few studies have been conducted to quantify its spatial variability. Our study focuses on the evaluation of two algorithms, Penman-Monteith (P-M) equation and the bulk aerodynamic (BA) parameterization of snow sublimation. The two methods were first evaluated against eddy covariance (EC) measurements of latent heat flux at towers located in the upper reaches of the Heihe River Basin (China). Both methods were in good agreement with the ground observations with high coefficient of determination (R2) and low root mean squared error (RMSE). Next, we estimated subpixel snow sublimation using remote sensing data at a 1-km × 1-km spatial resolution. The results based on satellite data were evaluated against ground measurements at the two experimental sites. The P-M equation gave R² = 0.75, RMSE = 8.4 Wm^-2 for Dashalong site and R² = 0.36, RMSE = 9.1 Wm^-2 for the Dadongshu site and performed better than the BA parameterization, which gave R² = 0.65, RMSE = 17.5 Wm^-2 for the Dashalong site and R² = 0.06, RMSE = 21.2 Wm^-2 for the Dadongshu site. Overall, the results indicate that P-M is promising for estimating snow sublimation at the regional scale using satellite observations.

Daily time series of microwave radiometer data obtained in one-orbit direction are full of observation gaps due to satellite configuration and errors from spatial sampling. Such time series carry information about the surface signal including surface emittance and vegetation attenuation, and the atmospheric signal including atmosphere emittance and atmospheric attenuation. To extract the surface signal from this noisy time series, the Time Series Analysis Procedure (TSAP) was developed, based on the properties of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT). TSAP includes two stages: (1) identify the spectral features of observation gaps and errors and remove them with a modified boxcar filter; and (2) identify the spectral features of the surface signal and reconstruct it with the Harmonic Analysis of Time Series (HANTS) algorithm. Polarization Difference Brightness Temperature (PDBT) at 37 GHz data were used to illustrate the problems, to explain the implementation of TSAP and to validate this method, due to the PDBT sensitivity to the water content both at the land surface and in the atmosphere. We carried out a case study on a limited heterogeneous crop land and lake area, where the power spectrum of the PDBT time series showed that the harmonic components associated with observation gaps and errors have periods ≤8 days. After applying the modified boxcar filter with a length of 10 days, the RMSD between raw and filtered time series was above 11 K, mainly related to the power reduction in the frequency range associated with observation gaps and errors. Noise reduction is beneficial when applying PDBT observations to monitor wet areas and open water, since the PDBT range between dryland and open water is about 20 K. The spectral features of the atmospheric signal can be revealed by time series analysis of rain-gauge data, since the PDBT at 37 GHz is mainly attenuated by hydrometeors that yield precipitation. Thus, the spectral features of the surface signal were identified in the PDBT time series with the help of the rain-gauge data. HANTS reconstructed the upper envelope of the signal, i.e., correcting for atmospheric influence, while retaining the spectral features of the surface signal. To evaluate the impact of TSAP on retrieval accuracy, the fraction of Water Saturated Surface (WSS) in the region of Poyang Lake was retrieved with 37 GHz observations. The retrievals were evaluated against estimations of the lake area obtained with MODerate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) data. The Relative RMSE on WSS was 39.5% with unfiltered data and 23% after applying TSAP, i.e., using the estimated surface signal only.

Satellite observations of the terrestrial biosphere cover a period of time sufficiently extended to allow the calculation of a reliable climatology. The latter is particularly relevant for studies of vegetation response to climate variability. Observations from space of the land surface are hampered by clouds at shorter wavelength and affected by water in the atmosphere in the microwave range. Both polar orbiting and geostationary satellites have a revisit frequency high enough to allow for some redundancy relative to the processes being observed, so that time series where a fraction of observations are removed and the resulting gaps filled are still very useful to monitor land surface processes. Two examples illustrate this concept in two different spectral regions: Thermal Infrared (TIR) and observations of land surface temperature to study the thermal behavior of the land surface in response to weather and climate and 37 GHz observations of the polarization difference in brightness temperature to retrieve the fractional abundance of watersaturated soil. Three applications of time series of land surface temperature are presented: (a) monitoring of spectral thermal admittance of the land surface; (b) estimation and mapping of air temperature and (c) monitoring of thermal load to assess the risk of forest fires. Two methods were applied to identify and remove anomalous observations (outliers) and to fill the resulting gaps: Harmonic ANalysis of Time Series (HANTS) and theMultichannel Singular Spectrum Analysis (M-SSA). The HANTS algorithm has been widely used to reconstruct time series of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Leaf Area Index (LAI), Land Surface Temperature (LST) as well as the polarization difference brightness temperature (PDBT) during the past 20 years to remove random noise or eliminate cloud/snow contamination. The M-SSA, an advanced methodology for time series analysis, was utilized to reconstruct gap-free LST time series using both the spatial and the temporal information content in the data set.