This book provides a comprehensive and advanced overview of the basic theory of thermal remote sensing and its application in hydrology, agriculture, and forestry. Specifically, the book highlights the main theory, assumptions, advantages, drawbacks, and perspectives of these methods for the retrieval and validation of surface temperature/emissivity and evapotranspiration from thermal infrared remote sensing. It will be an especially valuable resource for students, researchers, experts, and decision-makers whose interest focuses on the retrieval and validation of surface temperature/emissivity, the estimation and validation of evapotranspiration at satellite pixel scale, and the application of thermal remote sensing. Both Prof. Huajun Tang and Prof. Zhao-Liang Li work at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), China.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in the field of thermal infrared remote sensing. Temperature is one of the most important physical environmental variables monitored by earth observing remote sensing systems. Temperature ranges define the boundaries of habitats on our planet. Thermal hazards endanger our resources and well-being. In this book renowned international experts have contributed chapters on currently available thermal sensors as well as innovative plans for future missions. Further chapters discuss the underlying physics and image processing techniques for analyzing thermal data. Ground-breaking chapters on applications present a wide variety of case studies leading to a deepened understanding of land and sea surface temperature dynamics, urban heat island effects, forest fires, volcanic eruption precursors, underground coal fires, geothermal systems, soil moisture variability, and temperature-based mineral discrimination. ‘Thermal Infrared Remote Sensing: Sensors, Methods, Applications’ is unique because of the large field it spans, the potentials it reveals, and the detail it provides. This book is an indispensable volume for scientists, lecturers, and decision makers interested in thermal infrared technology, methods, and applications.

Although remote sensing is recognized as a powerful tool, less attention has been given in the past to the use of thermal, and especially thermal infrared (TIR) remote sensing. TIR data is useful for understanding the fluxes and redistribution of materials as a key aspect of land surface processes and land-atmosphere inter-relationships. This book

Satellite infrared imagery off the California coast, near Pt. Sur, show thermal patterns associated with an upwelling center; the patterns frequently curl cyclonically when interacting with the warmer California Current. This pattern shows sharp thermal fronts, easily identified in satellite IR images, that are strongly correlated with nutrient fronts during the early stages of upwelling. With sea truth data available, it was feasible to calibrate satellite derived sea surface temperature, by applying radiative transfer theory, and to infer nutrient concentrations from their linear inverse correlations with temperature. Thus, it was possible to calibrate satellite thermal fields to produce maps of nutrient distributions. When the inferred relationships were applied over representative regions of the upwelling center, standard deviations of 0.5C, 1.7 microns and 0.1 microns were computed for temperature, nitrate and phosphate, respectively. (Author).

This book is a collection of recent developments, methodologies, calibration and validation techniques, and applications of thermal remote sensing data and derived products from UAV-based, aerial, and satellite remote sensing. A set of 15 papers written by a total of 70 authors was selected for this book. The published papers cover a wide range of topics, which can be classified in five groups: algorithms, calibration and validation techniques, improvements in long-term consistency in satellite LST, downscaling of LST, and LST applications and land surface emissivity research.

In a new era of global awareness and globalization, what's happening around the world in real-time such as hurricanes, volcanic eruption, fires, drought, pollution, and other environmental and climate challenges are becoming increasingly more important and affect people's lives. To meet these challenges, Earth observations from a new generation of satellites have now become available giving us unprecedented capabilities to monitor and study our planet. With global coverage twice daily for the next several decades, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometers on polar orbiting satellites provide rich and publically available data sets for a large number of land, atmosphere, and ocean applications, including the monitoring of aerosols, cloud properties, radiation budget, sea surface temperature, ocean color, active fire, albedo, snow and ice, vegetation, land use/land cover, night-lights from human activities, and natural disasters. Calibration and validation of these satellite observations are essential to ensure the quality, accuracy, precision, and stability of the data for the applications. This book will review recent advances in satellite optical sensor calibration and validation methodologies, algorithms, and techniques. Example calibration and validation of environmental data products are also discussed. It aims to serve all professionals, researchers, students, scientists alike in academics, industries, government, and beyond.