Handbook of Environmental Engineering

9Remote Sensing of Environmental Variables and Fluxes

Morteza Sadeghi¹, Ebrahim Babaeian², Ardeshir M. Ebtehaj³, Scott B. Jones¹, and Markus Tuller²

¹ Department of Plants, Soils and Climate, Utah State University, Logan, UT, USA

² Department of Soil, Water and Environmental Science, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

³ Department of Civil, Environmental and Geo‐Engineering, Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

9.1 Introduction

The ability to accurately characterize and quantify large‐scale environmental processes is at the core of numerous earth science and environmental engineering applications that directly impact the global environment and human society. Potential applications include forecasting of weather and climate variability, management and allocation of water resources, agricultural plant production, prediction and monitoring of drought conditions, remediation of contaminated natural resources, prevention of natural disasters, or monitoring of ecosystem response to climate change.

While direct quantification and monitoring of large‐scale environmental processes are prohibitively expensive and laborious due to the large number of required sampling points, rapidly evolving remote sensing (RS) technology and retrieval techniques provide an exceedingly powerful means for determination of spatial highly heterogeneous environmental variables and fluxes at the regional to global scales.

RS is the science of acquiring, processing, ...